Hospital employees fired for posting photos of patients on MySpace

I recently wrote a post about how patient privacy can be threatened in blogs written by doctors. Now a new case illustrates another way that healthcare professionals can violate patient privacy online.

Yesterday the Associated Press reported that two hospital workers in New Mexico had been fired for taking pictures with their mobile phone cameras of patients being treated. Even worse, these pictures - "mainly close-ups of injuries being treated in the Albuquerque hospital's emergency room over the past few months" - were posted online on MySpace. This all happened despite the fact that hospital employees were banned from taking mobile phones int patient areas.

Unbelievably, this incident doesn't represent the first time this sort of thing has happened. In May last year the Tri-City Hospital in San Diego confirmed that medical workers in the hospital had been taking photos of patients with their mobile phones, and the Associated Press reports that there have also been similar violations in Arizona and South Dakota. Also, UCLA banned mobile phones and laptops earlier this year after a patient posted group photos of other patients on a social networking website, although I feel this instance is a slightly different issue.

This issue was picked up in the blogosphere (WSJ Health Blog, Kevin, M.D. and Scalpel or Sword to name a few) as bloggers were horrified that hospital employees could do something so stupid. Posting photos of patients online, particularly patients in an emergency room who are may well be unconscious and totally unaware that they are being photographed, is an unbelievable violation of patient privacy. Let's hope this is the last time this sort of thing happens.

Digging for the best healthcare information on the internet

You may have noticed that 'Vote' buttons have appeared at the bottom of my blog posts. Clicking on one of these buttons will submit the particular blog entry to Healthcare Today, a new website where users proffer and vote for the best healthcare news and blogs on the internet.

The majority of information for doctors and other healthcare professionals comes from traditional outlets like journals, but this route is a slow and very formal way of getting stuff out there. In comparison, the internet is far more immediate, but information online is liable to be poorly written, filled with inaccuracies, penned by crackpots, or hopelessly biased, and that's just for starters.

Healthcare Today aims to unearth good medical news and blogs online and highlight the most interesting stories. But as Shane, a creator of the site, says, "instead of being a reflection of some editor’s (possibly biased) perception, it’s the professionals in healthcare who decide what’s interesting and how interesting it is by submitting links and adding their votes."

Healthcare Today works in a similar way to the website Digg, in that users are invited to submit news articles, journal papers or blog posts that they discover on the net and then vote on links they find interesting. The front page of the site contains the most popular links, representing an essentially peer reviewed overview of the best medical information online.

The site is aimed at healthcare professionals - i.e. doctors, nurses and the like - so a lot of the links on Healthcare Today are to blog posts that discuss the day to day trials and tribulations of these groups. There are also plenty of links to medical or medicine-related news stories; for example, the most popular link at this exact moment is time is from ABC News: 'Grey's Anatomy' lesson? TV ups awareness, a story about a new study that has quantitatively shown that audiences of TV shows such as Grey's Anatomy absorb health messages in the programmes.

At the moment links only need about 4-5 votes in order to make it onto the front page, but hopefully as the number of users and of submitted links continues to grow Healthcare Today will come to truly represent the most up to minute source of healthcare information on the net.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here comes the shameless self promotion - if you think a post of mine is good and other people interested in medicine might want to read it, give the old vote button a click and submit the entry to Healthcare Today!