The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and newly enacted state laws limiting or banning abortion can be expected to bring new scrutiny to the privacy vulnerabilities of electronic health records.
This likelihood is discussed at some length in an article published Sept. 1 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, written by three health information policy experts at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“Our focus is on the liabilities to the parties that are involved in the creation and management of health information,” said Bradley Malin, PhD, “and on the points at which information could be leaked or used in a manner that was outside of the patient’s expectations. That can happen in some very explicit ways, but it can also happen in some ways that are more subtle, that I don’t believe everybody has really taken to heart.”