Team view maintains professionals' access to their own team's data

This month, we are rolling out a new feature that will allow team professionals to always be able to view medical data that their team had added on medical records. The data will be viewable even for patients who have been discharged or have stopped share their record with the team. This allows the team to ensure clinical safety and maintain medico-legal audit trail compliance without needing to make local back-ups.

Building on top of privacy labels and organization networks that we pushed out last month, we are making it easier for healthcare professionals to provide care and support for patients in more than one way without necessarily seeing all the sensitive medical data on patients’ medical records.

For example, nonprofit organizations like CRUK are building patient registries and support networks. As part of their mission they want to provide a patient with information, like educational resources and tools about their diseases, but do not want to see the rest of the patient’s medical record.

Similarly, clinical research organizations can maintain access to data they collected about the patient during a research trial without the patient sharing the rest of their medical record.

The feature also allows clinics and hospitals to maintain access to the medical data that they had added to the patient’s medical record. The access continues after discharging the patient and losing consent to see the rest of the record. The data visible includes data manually entered by professionals (e.g. discussion messages) and automatically transferred (e.g. laboratory results).

How does this work?

When a professional opens a patient’s record without consent for access PKB will automatically show only the data from the professional’s team. To see more data the professional will need consent. Until they have consent the professional will see a warning at the top of the record that the data are incomplete and out of date with a button to get access to more data. As usual, getting more access is through explicit consent (asking the patient), implicit consent (documenting a relationship of care) and break-the-glass (an emergency during which the patient lacks the capacity to consent).