There’s an unintended consequence of physicians using smartphone cameras to document patient cases and share images with their colleagues: The medical photos usually don’t get encrypted or even separated from personal pictures.
A new study in the journal Plastic Surgery found that nearly three-fourths of plastic surgeons surveyed by University of Calgary Researchers commingle their smartphone photos. About a quarter have “accidentally” shown patient pictures to friends and family, according to a story in Canada’s National Post.
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A yet-unpublished study conducted by an otolaryngologist in the Canadian capital of Ottawa found that a majority of ENTs “suspected their families could find patient photos on their phones,” the National Post reported.
It’s clearly a privacy issue, and often more serious than that, since sometimes the sharing isn’t so accidental.
The newspaper told the story of a urologist in Victoria, British Columbia, who took a picture of his handiwork after inserting a urinary catheter:
Then, as a “joke,” the doctor texted the image of his patient’s genitals to various friends and acquaintances.
The prank was a blatant ethical no-no, costing the specialist $20,000 in fines and a six-month suspension from medical practice last summer.
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In other words, the doc was sending dick pics.
Actually, we don’t know what gender the patient was, but that’s beside the point. We do know that the problem doesn’t stop at the border and certainly does include women.
From the story:
Police investigating a Maryland doctor for drug trafficking found several photos of female patients’ genitals on the physician’s phone. But it was not some nascent pornography business: he maintained the pictures were taken for clinical reasons — documenting a novel vaginal-reconstruction procedure — and was never prosecuted over them.
Um, yeah.
There are, of course, companies offering secure cloud storage of medical images. The National Post did mention medical photo sharing app Figure 1 (Canadian, of course), which counts more than 1 million users worldwide. Still, plenty of photos reside unencrypted on the phones of health professionals and more than a few are, for the rest of us at least, not suitable for work or for children.
Photo: Flickr user Jonathan Lidbeck
