New forms of medical data collection – should be complemented by a new European privacy standard?

The doctor’s obligation to maintain confidentiality about all medical information which he acquires through medical treatment is one of the most important and oldest principles applying to data protection. In a wider sense data protection belongs to the important cultural achievement and human heritage that everyone is entitled to the enjoyment of the right to privacy which entails the prohibition of any arbitrary interference by public authorities or other persons from the conditions to live and fulfil one’s own life.

The right to privacy nowadays is challenged by a dynamic technological evolution which can be described with digitalization covering high tech medicine or intra-networks and internetworks between hospitals and surgeries. It should also be mentioned that medical reports will no longer remain paper reports but will be substituted by electronic report files. It is highly probable that the management of data on genetically related people leads to the establishment of computerised data registers which are by their nature highly sensitive.

Medical data banks are no longer the only or most relevant form in which computerised medical data are held together. This also covers patients information in the doctor’s office computer and in his electronic diary and personal data fed into interactive consultation systems. Considering the worldwide projects establishing international networks of medical data banks, there is also to focus on the need of the introduction of a chip card, storing patient’s essential medical data as for example data about anamnesis and former treatment.

This, of course, raises the question of an effective limitation of patients’ card functions, which nowadays principally are functions as payment and identification devices. Also the regulation of access systems by key cards trying to avoid misuse by third parties or companies will be at stake as the patient privacy under European law.

Abstract

This article will ask whether and how the harmonisation of regulations in health related data storage and exchange can be achieved on European level, highlighting the importance of the patients’ privacy rights.