The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection sent a letter to the Ministry of Health regarding a number of problems with health-related personal dana protection and the need to rectify the state of affairs in the aforementoned area in a more robust and energetic manner.
The Commissioner believes that the laws regulating health-related record keeping are outdated and obsolete, and that the previously-mentioned together with a lack of organizational, technical and personnel measures consequently violates patients rights to personal data protection.
The Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic stated the following in relation to the aforementioned:
"The laws that were drafted and passed several decades ago in considerably different economic, political, cultural and other relevant circumstances are not and cannot be pertinent to the time we live in at the moment, and are not harmonized with the standards set by the Law on Personal Data Protection.
The existing laws in the field of healthcare do not provide adequate answers to a number of important questions that come up on a daily basis, e.g., who and under what circumstances can access patients' medical records, etc.
The Healthcare Act does not regulate what happens with patient data when a privately-owned healthcare institution closes down.
Also, the Act does not regulate the conditions under which the medical file data could be used for scientific purposes, while, at the same time, we hear very often the requests for establishing different registries of individuals suffering from certain diseases, the aim of those registries being to gather data for scientific purposes.
The lack of adequate normative, organizational, logistic, technical and personnel measures results in the frequent unnecessary and uncomfortable violation of privacy of individuals affected by certain diseases. In medical charts, documentation, and even on prescriptions, medical staff often writes the HIV/AIDS status of patients in red letters, making this piece of information available to a larger number of people resulting in primitive stigmatization of patients.
Finally, I have to remind yet again of the nonunderstandable tardiness of the Government to pass the Regulation on the Protection of Especially Sensitive Data, which would also include medical data. By not having the aforementioned Regulation, the provisions of the Healthcare Act which envision "special" protection of medical data are just empty statements.
Taken into consideration all that was previously mentioned, regardless of the objective and the subjective difficulties that our healthcare is faced with, it is necessary, without further ado, to start taking measures in order to ensure respect for the right to personal data protection in the field of healthcare which is guaranteed by the Constitution and the Law on Personal Data Protection."
