Consensus report

The Domain of Health Care Information Privacy
Protecting Identifiable Health Care Informational Privacy: A Consensus Report on Eight Content Areas for Performance Measure Development

After agreeing on a framework for assessing the quality of privacy protections for health care information, the next step that the Ethical Force Oversight Body took was to define conceptual categories or "content areas" that could be used to organize their development of performance measures. The eight "content areas" that emerged—transparency, consent, collection limitation, security, individual access, data quality, information use limitations, and accountability—represent the ethical interests of individuals and groups throughout the health care community.

The Ethical Force consensus report on protecting privacy (which can be accessed by clicking on the link below) outlines the eight "content areas." The report also provides rationale for why each "content area" is included; ways in which the areas can be realistically measured; and explanations, for each area, as to when exceptions might be made to maintaining patient privacy.