Can Transparency Enhancing Tools Support Patient's Accessing Electronic Health Records?

Patients that access their health records take more care of their health and, when in therapy, commit more seriously to improve their condition. This leads to a more effective and more efficient healthcare management, and is also in agreement with European directives on data protection. However, accessing medical data can be risky. Security should be assured and it should be evident to the patients, who has access to what data and any violation to patient's privacy requirements should be reported. We call this property transparency. Precisely this work looks into the Transparency Enhancing Tools that have been proposed to increase people's awareness about security and privacy on the Internet, and discusses to which extent these tools can empower transparency in healthcare.