Privacy and Confidentiality Scenario

This scenario is based on a true story and due to increased ubiquitous use of mobile technology more incidents such as this will occur. Nurses must fully understand privacy and confidentiality issues and apply the information to various settings and situations to best advocate for the patient. Working in a busy cardiac cath lab provides many opportunities for possible breaches of confidentiality or privacy. Jennifer works in a cath lab and has noticed mobile technology is encroaching on patient confidentiality and privacy. A few months back they were very busy and several patients were in the holding area awaiting procedures. Jennifer’s coworker, Tim, decided to take a picture of the patients in the holding area and posted it on Facebook to show his friends how busy he was. Jennifer felt very uncomfortable about this and told Tim she really did not think that was appropriate due to the patients in the picture. She also noted the schedule board was in the picture which contained patient initials, procedures, and doctor. Tim said it was nothing, as the patients could not really be identified and pretty much told Jennifer she was being, “Miss. Perfect because she was in school.” As time went by Jennifer noticed it was becoming commonplace for techs and nurses to text information back and forth about cases to the physicians on their personal cell phones. Initials were supposed to be used, but sometimes, patient names would be added by mistake. The physicians loved the convenience and encouraged this behavior. It wasn’t long before patient scheduling via Google was the new tool. This meant all the nurses, techs, and physicians could share a common calendar on Google Calendar and view the schedule in real time. Again, patient initials were to be used and at times full names came through. Every time a patient was added to the schedule a popup on the physician’s, tech’s, and nurses’ personal phones would flash the procedure, time, and patient. Jennifer knew all this was not correct as none of the phones or tools had been approved via the Compliance Officer or Information Technology. The most difficult thing was the unit manager was in agreement with the mobile communications and Jennifer felt she had nowhere to go to stop this potential breach of patient information.  Identify the issues related to patient privacy and confidentiality in this scenario.  Describe strategies your organization uses to safeguard patient information from the use of mobile devices.  Discuss the use of mobile devices for patient care in your organization and any organizational policies related to mobile devices. Specifically address the use of text messages to communicate patient care information and explain what happens to the message after it is sent.  Analyze your personal strategies used to protect patient health information on mobile devices.  Do these strategies adequately protect information in your patient care setting?