Patient Safety and Patient Privacy When Patient Reading Their Medical Records

Abstract

When patients get access to their personal health information new security demands arise. This paper presents results from a study aiming to improve the understanding of how the patients' different perceptions of their own personal health and health information preferences can be linked to anticipated positive and negative security concerns. The analysis and discussion focuses on investigating how the security issues and patients' perception on the benefits and threats of accessing their medical records relate to each other. The results show that a more holistic systemic perspective to information security is needed to support the effective use of medical records in the healthcare in information and data driven society in order to improve both patient safety and patient privacy. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.