Electronic Health Records: Achieving An Effective And Ethical Legal And Record Keeping Framework

Health records are essential to efficacious treatment and effect every induvidual. They are 'socially-critical' communications because the therapeutic relationship between doctor and patient is based on trust. Without any systematic ethical and legal safegaurds or recordkeeping framework, the application of new technologies for networking health records lacks social credibility. This multidiscipilinary study will provide a set of principles and standards relating to authencity, ownership, acess, privacy, and confidentiality of doctor-patient communications in a networked environment, which, if implemented, will benifit patients and the medical community thus furthering the development of more efficacious national health system.