AMA Journal of Ethics^®

The use of coded patient data for reimbursement purposes can tempt clinicians to exaggerate the severity of the patient's condition, skewing the accuracy of the data and interfering with clinical decision support and research.

Running away from the problems and inefficiencies of our current health care system and into the comforts of concierge medicine does little to advance health and well-being for the vast majority of people.

Outcome-based payment more closely aligns payments with what patients want, which is better health rather than more health care. But these approaches remain challenging to implement.

Addicts quickly learn the diagnoses that cannot be definitively confirmed or ruled out by examinations or test results but that elicit prescriptions for opioid pain management.

From the standpoint of protecting patients’ confidentiality, data ownership offers little improvement over the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the Common Rule.

An overview of methods by which electronic health records can preserve the confidentiality and security, integrity, and availability of patient data.

Instead of trying to reduce the number of people who have access to a patient's medical record by quarantining information, hospitals should explain the current meaning of confidentiality to patients as part of the informed consent process.

A requirement to uphold the confidentiality of information shared in the physician-patient relationship is a central tenet of medical professionalism that, while at risk and undermined in various ways in modern medicine, has been consistently endorsed from the time of Hippocrates.

Merely giving patients access to electronic health records made for use by clinicians will not help patients make use of the information they contain.

A discussion of how to handle the documentation of mental health care in electronic medical records so that patient wishes for confidentiality are balanced with the need for interdisciplinary communication and care coordination.