Art Caplan has a new piece at NBCNews.com. In “Is your doctor spying on your tweets? Social media raises medical privacy questions,” Caplan argues:
Presuming doctors, their helpers or your neighbors are going to look, ethical standards or not, shouldn’t patients be told if someone does? I think so. I think the transplant candidate had the right to know that he tweeted himself right out of a shot at a liver transplant. And you need to realize that information you put up on social media sites may wind up being used by your doctor, hospital, psychologist, school nurse or drug counselor.
Right now there are no rules or even suggestions to guide doctor-patient relationships over the Internet. Both now have new ways to look at one another outside the office or exam room. If they are going to continue to trust one another then we need to recalculate existing notions of medical privacy and confidentiality to fit an Internet world where there is not much of either.
For more, check out the full piece.