ABSTRACT
Privacy and confi dentiality are foundational principles in medicine and all of healthcare, but both terms are often used inconsistently and are diffi cult to defi ne. Privacy is generally recognized as the broader concept, sometimes including confi dentiality. Privacy has several dimensions – informational, physical, decisional, proprietary, and relational (Beauchamp and Childress 2013 : 312). This chapter concentrates on the informational dimension of privacy. Accordingly, privacy is defi ned here as a condition of limited access to an individual or information about an individual. Confi dentiality is defi ned as the condition under which information obtained or disclosed within a confi dential relationship is not redisclosed without the permission of the individual. Security is defi ned as the personal and electronic measures granting access to personal health information to persons or entities authorized to receive it and denying access to others (National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) 2006 ).
