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Social Media: Breaching Patient Privacy
HCS/335
October 8, 201

Social Media: Breaching Patient Privacy
What would you do if you logged into Facebook and saw that a medical student had posted personal pictures of you from a procedure that they observed? Do you believe that you have a legal right to have that picture removed? With the population of people using social media on the rise, situations similar to this issue are continuing to grow. Patient privacy has moved to the back burner, while social status has moved to the front; an issue that HIPAA is looking into for a solution.
Breaching Patient Privacy
Exposing a patient’s procedure, medical background, or personal information via social media has become one of the biggest issues in the health care industry. Young medical students have become enthralled in the ability to post pictures on a website to impress their friends. What these students do not realize is that they are gaining this praise at the cost of someone else’s expense. Park (2009), “Although med students fully understand patient-confidentiality laws and are indoctrinated in the high ethical standards to which their white-coated profession is held, many of them still use Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and other sites to depict and discuss lewd behavior and sexual misconduct, make discriminatory statements and discuss patient cases in violation of confidentiality laws, according to the survey, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.”(para. 2). The problem with sharing information on these social networking websites is that the information is not limited to the friends of the person posting the information, but it becomes public information. Regardless of the type of security settings set on the information, all it takes is one person sharing the information on their choice of social networking and it becomes

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