HEALTH INFORMATION BILL PENDING WITHIN WEEKS
This long awaited Bill will offer significant and revolutionary advances in the use and protections afforded to personal health information in Ireland. The objective of the bill is to create an integrated system whereby personal health information is available across many care settings and transferable between clinicians and hospitals both public and private.
This proposed National Electronic Health Record is expected to be facilitated by the introduction of Unique Health Identifiers under which an individual’s entire medical records from all sources will be available under the one identification number.
This legislation will affect us all as patients over the course of our lives as an integrated computerised system would help prevent unnecessary time consuming and costly repetitive testing in the absence of our health information which may be available only in another hospital many miles away and paper based. This will greatly enhance patient safety and allow for more efficient audit and research equally of huge benefit to patients and the healthcare system alike.
The security, confidentiality and disclosure of one’s personal health information is also paramount and the bill will strive to prevent potential problems of, for example, non-medical healthcare administrative staff having access to this information and loss of laptops or USB memory sticks containing highly sensitive information. In the USA many famous actors and pop stars have had their medical records leaked to the media and this pending Bill for the first time in Ireland is expected to introduce a criminal sanction for the illegal trading of personal health information.
The Health Information Bill is expected between now and September 2010 and thereafter it will go before the Oireachtas for discussion and the Bill may become the Health Information Act by the end of 2010!
Kevin Dunne, Associate
kdunne@hayes-solicitors.ie