Discussion
The e-health record or the electronic health record is a technological advanced medical record that is a recorded the medical history and improvement condition of the patients digitally (Pai et al., 2021). These records can be easily accessible by the physicians in-charge and other healthcare associates. These electronic health records have several benefits which are discussed as followed: 1. Providing a patient-centric approach, providing better healthcare facilities to the patients, 3. Fewer mishaps in analysing the patient’s condition as because the records are available, 4. Increased communication and efficiency in the care provided to the patients, 5. Providing the patients with effective treatment (Cerchione et al., 2022). The aim of the paper is to critically analyse the Australian digital health record system known as the “MY HEALTH RECORD” and examine the consent management and privacy act related to the My health record. The paper also comments on the opt-in and opt-out model of 2018 related to my health record.
The “MY HEALTH RECORD” is a system owned by the Australian government. It is a form of digital health record framework which was previously called Personally controlled electronic health or in short called the e-health record (oaic.gov.au, 2022). It is a comprehensive form of an individual health record and allows the physicians, registered nurses and nursing associates and other healthcare providers to access and view the health information of the specific individual. The MY HEALTH RECORD ACT launched in the year of 2012 established a legislative framework to limit the access and usage of the “my health record”. The My health record stopped any unauthorised collection of data or usage of my health record (Mohamadlou et al., 2018). The factor of privacy is included in the context of my health record due to the misuse of public data. My Health Record of a Healthcare Recipients refers to the track of material that the Central Controller creates and maintains in regard to the medical beneficiary, as well as details that may be acquired through that database, such as: (a) health insurance beneficiary evidence included with the Registration entrance; (b) health-related information capable of connecting to the health insurance beneficiary in the My Health Record framework which includes data that was included in the documentation obtainable through indicator provider; (c) these trend to the health insurance beneficiary in the My Health Record framework, such as information relevant to internal audit availability to the documentation; (d) replacement documents of these kind of data (Waitman et al., 2022).
Brief Description of My Health Record
Privacy
There are several concerns related to privacy as around the world there are numerous cases of data hacking and leaking of personal data (Hajli et al., 2021). When an individual is available on the internet, they are tracked by a variety of trackers for a variety of reasons. Trackers retain a trail of the browsing history and use numerous methods to preserve control of online actions. This gives them a comprehensive vision of who the person is and what their interests are, violating internet privacy policies and turning them into public assets. Almost all of the while, this monitoring is used only for advertising objectives, allowing marketers to target adverts based on a person’s preferences and expectations. However, fraudsters may exploit this data to conduct unlawful and illegal operations, putting their online presence at risk. Various webpages require personal information in order to utilize their offerings (Habib et al., 2020, April). These businesses frequently use cookies to safely store and also remember personally identifiable information, which they then use for a variety of objectives. In the majority of cases, this data is not secured and is accessible to everybody. This mismanagement of sensitive data might have catastrophic ramifications. This can also happen with My health record and the individual medical history and cases are stored, fraudsters can easily use this information and trick the patients.
Informed consent is a regulatory and moral necessity for a person participating in the study (Biros, 2018). It is the procedure in which a respondent is supposed to become more aware of the trial that are essential for the respondent to make decisions, and after reviewing all elements of the trial, the respondent knowingly and willingly validates his or her permission to cooperate in a specific clinical investigation and the importance of the research paper for medical information and human social assistance. It is presumed that the person signing the written consent understands everything that is written on the signed document. However, evaluating their perspective on the study is problematic because there is no standardized mechanism for determining an individual’s amount of comprehension provided. As a result, it’s reasonable to presume that some misinterpretation happens. Language interpretations that are wrong or inadequate might create misunderstandings. It is observed that several people sign a consent without understanding the cause behind it (Littman, 2018). It is after any mishap they file charges or lawsuits. This can be easily avoidable if the consent is explained to the patient and their family member.
Concerns Related to Privacy and Consent
The My Health Record system is a major government system that makes patient data about a medical beneficiary accessible for the objective of delivering care to that person (Legislation.gov.au, 2022). The main purpose of The act is to facilitate the creation and operation of a voluntary national public system for providing accessibility corresponding to health insurance beneficiaries in order to: (a) help counteract dissociation of patient information; (b) continue improving the performance and accessibility of patient records; (c) prevent the severity of potential adverse drug happenings and procedure redundancy, and (d) continue improving the collaboration and quality of health services.
The health practitioner law of western Australia is an agreement that is established is between the healthcare provider and the healthcare recipient (Legislation.gov.au, 2022). This law is followed by the medical practitioner and registered nurses and other healthcare associates.
The privacy act of Australia was established in the year of 1988. This is a principle of the Australian legislation and protects information about individuals from data theft (Lindsay, 2020). An Act to safeguard personally identifiable information and persons’ confidentiality in particular; to establish a Privacy Director; to abolish the Privacy Committee Act 1975; and for many other objectives (Witzleb, 2018). The Confidentiality and Privacy Act Act of 1998 is the name of the law.
This is followed by the My heath record. The health information of the participants cannot be accessed from overseas. The information and data of the participants would not be accessed unless the person is a registered nurse or registered physician with the proper identity of the healthcare association they are associated with. There have been no registered cases of the security breach of my health records. The system of the My health record has a higher level of security and all the information of the patients is safe and secure. All these data are monitored by the ethical trackers and the IT department. The option of Opt-in and the opt-in is established in the My heath records as so that the patients have the right to make themselves unidentifiable if they don’t want to be identified or wish to keep their health information hidden (Mehta et al., 2018). This helps individuals to keep their medical records private. One of the highlighted aspects of the My health record is myGOV account is needed for access to my health record. Despite of the healthcare individual being registered healthcare professional.
My Health Records Act 2012
I think My heath records have got the highest level of software protection because of the secured framework of the system. I think this system is an essential part of the Australian healthcare system because the data about the patients can be accessible but the individual if they are registered practitioners with myGOV ID (Judge & McGennis, 2021). As well there were no cases of data breaches and mismanagement of the information of the patients.
Conclusion
From the above analysis, it can be concluded that The e-health record or the electronic health record is a technological advanced medical record that is a recorded the medical history and improvement condition of the patients digitally. The “MY HEALTH RECORD” is a system owned by the Australian government. It is a form of digital health record framework which was previously called Personally controlled electronic health or in short called the e-health record. It is a comprehensive form of an individual health record and allows the physicians, registered nurses and nursing associates and other healthcare providers to access and view the health information of the specific individual. There are several concerns related to privacy as around the world there are numerous cases of data hacking and leaking of personal data. When an individual is available on the internet, they are tracked by a variety of trackers for a variety of reasons. Informed consent is a regulatory and moral necessity for a person participating in the study. It is the procedure in which a respondent is supposed to become more aware of the trial that are essential for the respondent to make decisions, and after reviewing all elements of the trial, the respondent knowingly and willingly validates his or her permission to cooperate in a specific clinical investigation and the importance of the research paper for medical information and human social assistance. The system of the My health record has a higher level of security and all the information of the patients is safe and secure. All these data are monitored by the ethical trackers and the IT department. The option of Opt-in and the opt-in is established in the My health records as so that the patients have the right to make themselves unidentifiable if they don’t want to be identified or wish to keep their health information hidden.
References
Legislation.gov.au. (2022). My Health Records Act 2012. Legislation.gov.au. Retrieved 31 March 2022, from https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021C00475.
The National Law
Pai, M. M., Ganiga, R., Pai, R. M., & Sinha, R. K. (2021). Standard electronic health record (EHR) framework for Indian healthcare system. Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology, 21(3), 339-362. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10742-020-00238-0
Cerchione, R., Centobelli, P., Riccio, E., Abbate, S., & Oropallo, E. (2022). Blockchain’s coming to hospital to digitalize healthcare services: Designing a distributed electronic health record ecosystem. Technovation, 102480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2022.102480
Mohamadlou, H., Lynn-Palevsky, A., Barton, C., Chettipally, U., Shieh, L., Calvert, J., … & Das, R. (2018). Prediction of acute kidney injury with a machine learning algorithm using electronic health record data. Canadian journal of kidney health and disease, 5, 2054358118776326. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2054358118776326
Waitman, L. R., Song, X., Walpitage, D. L., Connolly, D. C., Patel, L. P., Liu, M., … & Davis, A. M. (2022). Enhancing PCORnet Clinical Research Network data completeness by integrating multistate insurance claims with electronic health records in a cloud environment aligned with CMS security and privacy requirements. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 29(4), 660-670. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocab269
Hajli, N., Shirazi, F., Tajvidi, M., & Huda, N. (2021). Towards an understanding of privacy management architecture in big data: an experimental research. British Journal of Management, 32(2), 548-565. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12427
Habib, H., Pearman, S., Wang, J., Zou, Y., Acquisti, A., Cranor, L. F., … & Schaub, F. (2020, April). ” It’s a scavenger hunt”: Usability of Websites’ Opt-Out and Data Deletion Choices. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3313831.3376511
Littman, L. (2018). Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLoS One, 13(8), e0202330. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330&fbclid=IwAR20rZXNYOsL8Cn3rBDr5kDMSCiMVANKj8NBKHh-YuRrp59PZpzdesKbefg
Biros M. (2018). Capacity, Vulnerability, and Informed Consent for Research. The Journal of law, medicine & ethics : a journal of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 46(1), 72–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073110518766021
Lindsay, D. (2020). Liability of Platforms under Australian Privacy Law. Australian Law Journal. https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/141775
Witzleb, N. (2018). Determinations Under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) as a Privacy Remedy. Remedies for Breach of Privacy (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2018), Monash University Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper, (3189397). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3189397
Mehta, S. J., Khan, T., Guerra, C., Reitz, C., McAuliffe, T., Volpp, K. G., Asch, D. A., & Doubeni, C. A. (2018). A Randomized Controlled Trial of Opt-in Versus Opt-Out Colorectal Cancer Screening Outreach. The American journal of gastroenterology, 113(12), 1848–1854. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41395-018-0151-3
Judge, C., & McGennis, I. (2021). The SAFE-PSC-MyGovID Framework for Public Service Identity Management. https://assets.gov.ie/204846/e57e6e20-1965-4a8f-a34a-8e6d2df5e524.pdf
oaic.gov.au. (2022). My Health Records. Home. Retrieved 31 March 2022, from https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/the-privacy-act/rules-and-guidelines/my-health-records.