The Patient, Data Protection and Changing Healthcare Models

Healthcare is changing. It is moving to a paperless environment, a team-based, interdisciplinary and patient-centred profession. Value-driven strategies, evidence-based medicine, data-driven technology, decision support and automated decision-making are adopted in modern healthcare models. Health-related data are subject to eagerness characterising our data-driven economy.

Amidst these changes, is the patient and his or her right to data protection, privacy and autonomy.

The question arises how to match phenomena that characterise the predominant ethos in modern healthcare systems, such as e-health and personalised medicine, with patient autonomy and data protection laws. That matching exercise is essential. The successful adoption of ICT in healthcare depends, at least partly, on how the public’s concerns about data protection and confidentiality are addressed.

Three backbone principles of European data protection law, in particular, are considered bottlenecks for the implementation of modern healthcare systems: informed consent, anonymisation and purpose limitation. The book assesses the adequacy of these principles and considers them in the context of technological and societal evolutions. A must-read for every professional active in the field of data protection law, health law, policy development or IT-driven innovation.