Privacy laws need to be changed to allow doctors to discuss a patient’s genetic disorders with family members who may be affected, a medico-legal expert says.
Following a presentation last night, Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne and member of the Australian Health Ethics Committee, Loane Skene, told Pharmacy eNews there was a need for legislation to acknowledge the benefits e-health records could give doctors treating patients by providing information on other blood relatives.
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“In future we should take a more familial approach to health care, particularly acknowledge that a lot of information in the future will be genetic and whenever you have genetic information it has implications not only for you, but also for your close blood relatives.
“So information should be recorded that is relevant for blood relatives and you should not be entitled to stop that happening.
“To do this effectively, we will need to amend our privacy laws and to have an effective method of securely recording and retrieving patients’ medical details when needed, both to treat that person and to assist in treating his or her blood relatives,” she told Pharmacy eNews.
Prof Skene described the introduction of individual health identifiers on 1 July as the first step to linking different sources of medical information about patients, adding they would pave the way for e-health records.
She stressed the e-health records would improve the provision of health services by giving health professionals better access to a range of information including the history of medication prescribed to individual patients.
“When we look at the information about what happens with adverse events in hospitals, an alarming number of patients get the wrong drugs or sometimes even have the wrong procedure… if we have a better system of identifying patients then that should help reduce adverse events in hospitals,” she said.
