Case prepared by Daniel Walker (Health Services Management, 11th Edition: 2018)
Dr. Mylene Figuero entered one of her examination rooms to see her next patient, a man in his mid•fifties, sitting waiting for her. As she sat down in front of a computer showing his electronic health record (EHR), she recognized the patient as a famous former football player. She asked what brought him in today. and in response. the patient immediately launched into a description of his issues. He had recently been experiencing confusion and having difficulty focusing.
As Dr. Figuero began to type the information into the EHR. however, the patient became more reluctant to talk freely about his situation. She prompted him to continue, but the man clammed up, telling her that he had just not been sleeping and that he had to leave. Dr. Figuero was worried that the patient was withholding information about his mental health. and she thought that his symptoms. combined with his history as a football player, hinted at Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Figuero has seen this type of behavior before, and she thought it had become more common among her patients since she switched from paper charts to the electronic record. She worried that patients might be concerned about their privacy of their health information once it was available in the digital world. Indeed, she had just read an article about an EHR system that had been hacked at a nearby hospital. She felt confident that her own EHR system was safe, because she had purposefully chosen a platform with two factor authentication and added security features. Still, she suspected that patients might not trust that the system was secure, and she wondered how their concerns over the privacy of sensitive information might change their interactions with their doctors. Discuss the following questions: Why might the patient's withholding of information ronrern Dr. Figuero' Why might the natient withhold information' Assuming Dr. Fiver() is correct that the withholding is a resift of the patient's privacy concerns, what could she do to change that behavior?
Sample Solution