Patient data protection stressed

The Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) has urged the government to enact a data protection law founded on a human rights approach.

Launching a report on ‘Data privacy in Pakistan’s healthcare sector’ on Monday, the foundation’s executive director Nighat Dad noted that healthcare data is an imperative component of personal data.

“The absence of a data protection law in the country leaves us all vulnerable, particularly patients,” she added. The study found that most people attached a great degree of importance to medical data as 38.6 per cent of respondents said they considered it as important as other kinds of data, 31.8% said it was more important and 29.5% considered it less sensitive than the general data.

While consent is considered the benchmark for data collection, only 40.9% of the respondents said consent was obtained when data was collected and 31.8% said not obtained, while 27.3% said they were unsure.

The study found that 36.4% of patient data was recorded digitally, 27.3% manually 27.3% through a hybrid approach.

DRF data privacy portfolio project manager Zainab Durrani, who is the author of the research notes, stated, “There is an urgent need to focus our energies on addressing the basics of medical ethics such as the all-important requirement of confidentiality, which is not as commonplace in the healthcare industry in Pakistan as we would have hoped.” At the launch, the DRF shared its findings with experts from the healthcare and research sectors, primarily shedding light on how healthcare information is collected.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 28^th, 2023.