If doctor-patient confidentiality prevents you from sharing information with third parties without your patient’s consent, aren’t you violating it by using WhatsApp and Gmail?
And this applies to any organization. Not just healthcare workers and lawyers.
Moreover, if I request to be contacted via Signal, I suspect my doctor won’t agree to download a new app just for me. They could argue that it messes up their workflow.
Yes. But we could end up in a stalemate if I refuse to use WhatsApp or accept emails from Gmail.
I am not talking about an entire clinic, but a single doctor’s practice.
From my experience, it is usually single practices that use Gmail. Where I am, most doctors in a hospital or clinic have their own practice. There is no clinic or hospital email provider. In the same hospital, you could have one doctor who uses Gmail and another who has their own private domain.
I don’t think it’s unachievable to push for a policy that demands that doctors and businesses don’t use Gmail. It’s my understanding that in the US, by law, a doctor can only use Gmail, if it’s a business google account. Only then do they have some form of protection.
Gmail is HIPAA compliant, and can be used to receive, store, or send Protected Health Information (PHI) when Google’s email service is used as part of an Enterprise Workspace Plan supported by a Business Associate Addendum to the Workspace Terms of Service.
I don’t live in the US, but even if I did, my doctor doesn’t have a Google Enterprise account.