Balancing Confidentiality and Collaboration Within Multidisciplinary Health Care Teams

Abstract

As multidisciplinary perspectives are increasingly integrated into the treatment of health problems, opportunities for clinical psychologists in medical settings are expanding. Although cross-discipline collaboration is at the core of multidisciplinary treatment models, psychologists must be particularly cautious about information sharing due to their profession's ethical standards regarding patient confidentiality. Psychologists' ethical obligations require them to achieve a delicate balance between contributing to the treatment team and protecting patient confidentiality. In the current review, relevant ethical standards and federal guidelines are applied to everyday practices of clinical psychologists in medical settings. Additionally, recommendations for individual psychologists, health care organizations, and graduate training programs are presented.

Substance use disorder patient privacy and comprehensive care in integrated health care settings.

“…Clinical level. Providers bear the responsibility of educating patients about privacy rights, what information will be shared with other providers in the treatment team, and why (Van Liew, 2012). In addition, providers should consider charting only information relevant to the patient's current care, rather than providing a full history, which may not be necessary to address patient's presenting concerns and is overburdening to other members of the treatment team (Benefield, Ashkanazi, & Rozensky, 2006).…”

Confidentiality and Mental Health/Chaplaincy Collaboration

“…Potential solutions have been posed in the form of guidelines that can be incorporated in practice and policy for both chaplains (McCurdy, 2012) and mental health professionals (Van Liew, 2012). Both authors reference the need to carefully consider what is documented about interactions and educating the service recipient about the collaboration.…”

“…Confidentiality has been discussed as a potential barrier to team collaboration in a variety of contexts, including sexual assault response teams (Cole, 2011), child protection (Darlington, Feeney, & Rixon, 2005), and health care teams (Miller, Charles-Jones, Barry, & Saunders, 2005;Van Liew, 2012), but there is scarce research available regarding the role of confidentiality related to chaplain participation on these interdisciplinary teams. Ethical discussions about chaplain documentation in patient charts have included pros and cons for including chaplains as team members (Loewy & Loewy, 2007;McCurdy, 2012).…”

Learning Health-Care Worker Networks from Electronic Health Record Utilization

“…Recent studies show connections among health-care workers can be learned from their activities in electronic health record (EHR) systems [14][15][16][17][18][19]. EHR systems are a platform used by health-care workers to diagnose patients and exchange diagnostic results [20,21]. In modern health-care environments, an increasing number of health-care workers utilize EHR systems as the primary tool to diagnose patients and exchange health information [22].…”