ABSTRACT
The protection of patient confidentiality is the cornerstone of effective healthcare, though this must be balanced with the need to use information in other contexts. Many groups have legitimate reasons for seeking access to patient data, including healthcare providers, administrators, researchers, law enforcement agencies, auditors and policy makers, and their work often benefits the whole community, including, indirectly, patients themselves. Individual patients, however, have equally legitimate rights to limit the extent to which their personal and sensitive medical data are used. Resolving this apparent conflict poses the greatest challenge to all those involved in patient care; a problem made all the more difficult by the complexity of the healthcare environment, and the constantly changing legal, social and ethical framework that applies, not only to the future use of medical records, but frequently to large numbers of retrospective records as well.
