Privacy and health care /

This in-depth examination of the moral and ethical issues surrounding privacy of medical information consists of a series of essays presented at the Medical Privacy in Information Age Conference at the Center for Ethics at Georgia State University in November 1999. Eight contributors examine health information privacy issues, four favoring restricting medical information, two taking the opposite view. The issues are debated in the stated context of the increasing complexity of the US health care system, rises in medical costs, and the use of computer files to store and retrieve medical records. The argument is made that under the current division of labor in health care, it may be crucial to good medical care and patient safety for a person in charge of one aspect of care to know about other aspects of care that may be incompatible. General readers; undergraduates through faculty; two-year technical program students. J. E. Allen University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill