In the previous article, we looked at concerns that privacy professionals have with the use of personal data in contact mapping and other solutions designed to help fight Covid-19. Now, our CTO Chris Cooper looks at other reasons why consent management is important to healthcare providers.
5 reasons why Consent Management is a burning issue in healthcare
Now, more than ever, healthcare companies are tackling challenges on all fronts. Chief among them is the need to make effective use of patient data without compromising privacy or putting that data at risk. Effectively managing patient consent to data processing is an important part of that puzzle. We’ve put together our top five things that healthcare organisations need to know about Consent Management.
Enterprise Consent Management provides a foundation
It has been the convention to collect consent – for medical purposes or data processing – through paper forms. Forms that get misplaced, aren’t easily accessed, and which you can’t search or index automatically.
An enterprise consent management platform provides a unified, standard foundation for consent collection and storage. It creates a single golden consent record for each patient. You can then access and update easily and efficiently. You also have a record which can’t get lost!
Interoperability matters
The main function of a consent management system is to enable a check of patient consent records. Interoperability is essential to making that happen, especially when consent crosses organisational boundaries.
The Kantara Initiative’s Consent Receipt specification provides a standardised format for consent. It supports seamless exchange of consent records between different organisations.
Consent management can be adopted incrementally
Change is difficult and risky, and few changes are more difficult or risky than large-scale IT projects! Fortunately, you can deploy a good consent management system incrementally as you replace or modernise systems.
Consentua, for example, uses an anonymous numeric identifier that can be easily added as a field in the patient records system. No duplication of data and consent records don’t become another governance risk!
Consent management is patient-centred
A golden consent record puts patients’ wishes at the heart of their care. A patient dashboard lets patients stay in control of the consent they’ve granted.
The focus should be on mapping the purposes for processing patient data. This will include the different stakeholders and systems involved. Once the consent flow is mapped out, the consent management system can be programmed to set off necessary triggers, validations and notifications as consent records change.
Consent management is ready to go, right now!
Speed, ease of adoption and cost avoidance are critical when deploying a new service. Check to see if your proposed solution has an easy-to-use widget that can be simply dropped into a web or mobile app codebase.
Set out the consent regime you need for your particular challenge. It could be clearing patients for discharge or sharing the patient record across hospital departments. Enable the API then create the purposes and consent services through the admin dashboard. The final step is to bind the widget to the relevant consent service. You are up and ready in minutes to start collecting your users’ consent decisions.
Consentua is a world-leading consent management platform. It is available now and is quick and easy to deploy. Free small-scale trials are available during the Coronavirus crisis. Find out more by emailing david@consentua.com or visit www.consentua.com