Re: But will it safeguard patient privacy ?
All your records and data are on computers any way. The paper medical notes are just a printout or a copy of something that has already existed or still does exist on a computer/server/cloud system (barring legacy notes).
So a centralised secure system (that is actually secure) is a better option than random semi secure systems that have some of your information on. It already happens in the police where the PNC have a trove of information on you and the security services no doubt have even more. So it can be done.
Logging on/off is generally pretty good and even if a PC is left logged on there is still a requirement to log in to the application to get access. Once again similar to the Police.
As for medical students, they see a massive amount of interesting cases with their own eyes and can easily chat about them, they no doubt do, however patient confidentiality is probably higher in the medical field than it is in most other sectors (replacing with client/customer/public confidentiality as appropriate for that sector). Medical people also, generally, are just not that interested in things that you may think is an interesting case (e.g. embarrassing for you) as they have seen similar or worse many times before. An interesting case to a medic is more likely to be highly boring to the lay person.
The only people who could have issues would be celebrities who might have a low grade medical person looking at their notes, but to be honest they could do that at the moment anyway and it is surprisingly rare that information ever gets leaked or that the media would publish it if it was.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
