A New York radiologist and professor is urging his peers to act with extreme caution when posting patient imaging info on social media, following a recent controversial incident on Facebook.
Robert William Schloss, MD, said he awoke one day to find three CT scans, shared in a rad interest group, of a foreign body lodged in one individual’s rectum. The post was accompanied by the caption “always a good start to a [holiday redacted],” which had already garnered dozens of reactions in just a few hours.
The individual’s genitalia, exam indication, date and time, and rad tech signature were all clearly visible, Schloss wrote Friday in Clinical Imaging. While the post was eventually taken down, the damage was done, and the physician believes the incident underlines the importance of acting responsibly online.
“Much like carbon footprints, digital footprints represent the trails of permanent online information attached to individuals whether they create that content themselves or someone else does it for them,” the Weill Cornell Medicine diagnostic radiologist wrote Aug. 14. “Content can be negative or positive, and radiologists must consider how best to control the nature of their own digital footprints. One should assume that content posted on social media is permanent even if subsequently deleted.”
Too often, clinicians assume that they’re safe, just because they exclude names and other basic information. However, radiologists must factor in 15 other potential identifiers, Schloss wrote, which include date elements beyond DOB, geography and biometric identifiers. In the case of the aforementioned patient, the uniqueness of the particular rectal foreign body alone was a giveaway, he wrote.
To avoid such flubs, Schloss urged his peers to go beyond HIPAA, consult professional standards from organizations such as the American College of Radiology, and look to mentors and coworkers. Taking a deep breath and waiting overnight before posting is also a solid practice.
“Radiology and other image-related fields of medicine must consider with greater gravity the potential to breach patient confidentiality even when written and numerical identifiers are excluded,” he wrote.
Read more of the opinion piece in Clinical Imaging here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.