Doctor-Patient Confidentiality?

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2011/03/doctor-patient-confidentiality

From a New York Times news article about a horrible bus accident on I-95:

The wife of a Jacobi Medical Center surgeon said her husband called her from work and described a passenger with a crushed skull and others with hand and arm amputations. She showed an iPhone photo, texted from Jacobi, of a hand and forearm, severed just below the elbow, lying on an operating table.

The Times article doesn't say to whom this iPhone photo was shown or who texted it, but if it was to a reporter, how inappropriate was that, and how weird is it for the surgeon, or anyone else in the operating room, to be texting operating-room photos home to his wife, and for the wife to be then showing the photos to a reporter, and for the reporter to be then shielding the behavior of both the surgeon and the wife with the newspaper-bestowed protection of anonymity?

by Editor  |  Mar 12, 2011 at 10:14 pm Related Topics:  Health Care receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list