Ontario Privacy Commissioner’s Report Urges Safeguards in EHR Systems

The Canada Health Infoway (CHI) is a not-for-profit corporation established in 2001 to spearhead the development of electronic health information systems and to better integrate the use of electronic health records (EHRs). The long-term objective is to have one EHR for each individual that will be available to health care providers anywhere in Canada to aid in delivering services to that individual. As of March 31, 2009, 17% of Canadians had an EHR, but CHI’s goal is to push that figure to 100% by the end of 2016. On March 2, 2012, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, together with CHI, released Embedding Privacy Into the Design of Electronic Health Records to Enable Multiple Functions (Report). The Report discusses the value of secondary uses of EHRs that go beyond the provision of direct care to a person and are used for wider policy goals such as forming the basis for medical research and producing industry practice guidelines. The Report acknowledges that while personal information in EHRs that identifies the individual (such as a person’s name) is required in order to provide services, it is rarely necessary to retain this information for secondary uses. The Report recommends the introduction of Privacy by Design measures into systems controlling and housing the EHRs. Specifically, Ms Cavoukian advocates de-identifying software and protocols to strip personal health information from EHRs before providing the records for secondary purposes. For more information and commentary, see: http://tinyurl.com/74km44l; and http://tinyurl.com/7p6bm8j Summary by: Thomas Wong