Confidentiality of Health Care Information

Throughout history the need to protect the confidentiality of an individual's health care information has been recognized as legitimate. All graduating doctors are required to swear to the ancient Hippocratic Oath, which specifically calls for a physician to keep his or her diagnoses and care of an individual private.

In the United States we are fortunate to have had strong and consistent policies at both the federal and state level that protect the privacy of the individual health care consumer. But with the rise of large corporate health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and digital communications such as the Internet new threats to the privacy of personal medical records have emerged. The last several years have seen reports of large-scale security breaches in massive healthcare data bases, with millions of records compromised.

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