Scoping Review on Physicians’ obligation to Maintain Patient Confidentiality

Abstract

Protecting patients' confidentiality is an essential practice that is key to achieving successful healthcare provision. Physicians are always obligated to maintain patients' confidentiality at all costs. The road towards ensuring that physicians play their part in fulfilling this obligation has not always been clear. Many strategies have been devised to help bring clarity and avoid data breaches. Scoping review research about this issue was conducted with the aid of the Arksey and O'Malley framework. Multiple studies and articles were reviewed using medical databases such as Web of Science, Google Scholar, ProQuest, MEDLINE, and Scopus. The keywords in searching relevant studies and articles were privacy, confidentiality, and physicians' obligation on confidentiality. Target websites were also used relevant websites containing information on patient rights and confidentiality. Full-text studies and abstracts were independently screened using prespecified inclusion and exclusion criteria. The literature included was focused on protecting patient confidentiality and why it is key to achieving successful healthcare provision. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, the data collected will be analyzed to reach findings that are free from bias. Through the database searches, it is expected that many results will be retrieved due to the many studies that have been done on the study’s objective. This helped with drawing conclusive findings that would assist in future research on protection of patient confidentiality especially with the sector’s increased adoption of technology.