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Blog spotlight: Study finds medical blogs risk patient privacy

Nurse Leader Weekly, August 18, 2008

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This week, a new study explores patient privacy issues with medical bloggers:

Blogs have emerged as great tools for nurses and physicians wanting to spread healthcare information. For some, they serve as outlets to share experiences with others in the field. But could they be relaying too much to the public?

A study recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine examined 271 medical blogs to determine how often nurses and physicians wrote about patients, violated patient privacy, or displayed a lack of professionalism. Of the findings:

• 42% of blogs had content describing private interactions with patients
• 17% of blogs disclosed information sufficient for patients to recognize themselves or their doctors
• 18% of blogs portrayed patients "negatively"
• A few blogs displayed pictures of patients in which patients could easily be identified

Tara Lagu, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and an internal medicine specialist conducted the study. She also found 65% of the blogs were written anonymously, with the remaining blogs identifying the names of the authors. View an abstract of the study.

What are your thoughts after seeing these results?

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