Medical privacy, confidentiality, and privilege and their relationship to the instruction of medical office technology curricula

Abstract

The details of our personal lives are our property and no one else's business. Those professionals who train medical office workers need to teach the medical law and ethics to those who will deal with these personal details of our lives. The instructors of medical office technology indicate that the right to medical privacy and all that it encompasses are very essential in the instruction of this curricula. Yet, they are not as familiar as they should be with the laws, and they are not covering medical law and ethics thoroughly in all curricula. Medical law and ethics should be taught as a separate core class in all medical office technology curricula, regardless of the length of training involved. Health care providers, their employees, and their agents have a legal duty to adopt security safeguards for the information they acquire and maintain--physical care of the recorded information, and care that employees are not verbally sharing the recorded information publicly. Verbal leakage of medical information may be the most dangerous due to how quickly information travels through the grapevine and the tremendous distortion of the information that occurs.