Personal Health Data Better Protected By ISO Standard

A new Standard for Health informatics – Classification of purposes for processing personal health information, ISO/TS 14265:2011, will increase protection of personal health information used by clinicians and others in healthcare organisations. The Standard defines a set of high-level categories of purposes for which such personal health information can be processed.

Elaine Sawatsky and Dipak Kalra, Project leaders of the committee that developed the Standard, comment, 'This important piece of work is now available to help organisations understand how to manage the personal health information that they hold, and how to ensure that the information is used appropriately and consistently.'

Electronic health records (EHRs) are used more and more. They involve the systematic electronic collection of health information about individual patients or populations. Information may at times need to be shared with other organisations (for example, between a hospital and a general practitioner). For ethical and legal reasons, information should only be used for the purposes for which it was collected or created. Up to now there has been no standard listing of the possible kinds of purpose of use of personal health information.

ISO/TS 14265 provides a framework to classify the various specific purposes that can be defined and used by individual policy domains (for example, healthcare organisations, regional health authorities, and jurisdiction countries).

Order ISO/TS 14265:2011 (hard copy) Health Informatics – Classification of purposes for processing personal health information from www.standards.co.nz. You can order PDFs of ISO Standards by calling 0800 782 632 during business hours or emailing enquiries@standards.co.nz


Related Standards
• ISO 10159:2011 Health informatics – Messages and communication – Web access reference manifest
• ISO/HL7 10781:2009 Electronic health record-system functional model, Release 1.1
Related articles
• Standardisation – how New Zealand contributes to international records management Standards, Touchstone, February 2012
• Revised health and disability services Standards published, media release, 22 October 2008

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