Final answer:
Health records are critical for maintaining a comprehensive medical history and are used in healthcare decision-making. The development of policies to manage these records requires addressing control and privacy of genetic information, safeguards for confidentiality, and balancing patient care with costs and privacy risks. Additionally, sharing digital health records among providers to improve care while ensuring privacy is a key consideration.
Step-by-step explanation:
The documentation of genetic information, immunizations, hospitalizations, surgeries, medications, and personal, family, occupational, and environmental histories that are maintained over a lifetime are typically found in a person’s medical records or health records. These records are integral in managing a patient’s health history and are used to inform healthcare decisions. When managing and sharing these records, especially in digital formats, certain challenges and considerations arise.
There are three pivotal questions to address when developing policies regarding health records:
- Who controls a person’s genetic information?
- What measures are in place to ensure the information remains confidential and secure?
- How can the quality of patient care be balanced with costs, while also mitigating risks to individual privacy
Additionally, the sharing of digital records among health providers has been proposed as a method to improve healthcare quality while reducing costs. This raises further questions about how to best protect the privacy of electronic medical records. Epidemiological studies, such as those that track notifiable diseases, depend on medical records to inform public health initiatives and risks. Researchers and public health officials must handle such data with utmost care to maintain individual privacy and comply with laws such as the Freedom of Information Act.