And if the answer is yes, how will it be enforced?
A rash of incidents in hospitals across the country involving camera phones has led to firings — and the realization that monitoring the devices in clinical facilities is no easy task.After sorting through red tape, a California hospital has fired nine employees who in April either took or looked at camera-phone photos of a patient’s X-ray. Meanwhile, at least three other hospitals across the country are struggling with similar problems.
“I think all hospitals in the United States are going to have to deal with (camera-phone use),” said Suellyn Ellerbe, chief executive officer of Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, California, a suburb north of San Diego. Photo-equipped PDAs, which doctors frequently use, pose special problems, said Ellerbe, whose hospital fired the nine workers.
Camera phones are a difficult privacy issue for medical institutions because regulations banning them — which already exist in many hospitals — are difficult to enforce. But high-profile cases may be spreading the word that taking pictures on the job can lead to unemployment.
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- Transfers and bad hospitals
- When patients extort hospitals
- California’s balance billing ban, are hospitals about to give patients refunds?
- When hospitals call 911
- Patient privacy, MySpace and Facebook
- The sad state of pediatrics in California
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That works both ways, Kevin. See my comment under your post about Andrew Speaker’s father “covertly” taping a conversation with public health officials/doctors.
As a patient, I’ve taken lots of pictures of my doctors with a regular digital camera, including one of Doctor Gialde stitching my leg up. Although he asked me why I was taking pictures, and gave me permission, I could tell he wasn’t altogether comfortable with it, and I’ve decided not to take any more. Doctors have enough to worry about without them feeling like the patient is gathering evidence to use against them.
I don’t know how different this is from physicians saving a copy of the x-ray image onto a USB drive to use in resident teaching — a common occurence at all the hospitals I trained at. Ideally the presenter should remove identifying information, but that doesn’t always happen.
If the concern is about patient confidentiality, the solution is not to impose cumbersome and difficult bans on devices that may be used to infringe it (after all, then you may as well ban pens and paper, as well as human brains), but to punish inappropriate behaviour.
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