This week's introduction

There are two main approaches to protecting client information in a shared database like HIFIS 4.

The first approach is by controlling what information gets collected.  The second approach is by controlling who has access to that information.

This week, we're going to be talking about the first approach (we'll cover the second approach next week). With regards to HIFIS 4, that can be divided into two parts:

• making sure that we have informed consent from our service participants, especially consent to collect their information, and,
• controlling what information exactly we're collecting

We'll cover what information we're collecting later on in the course, but this week we're going to be focusing on consent. This is the real fundamental building block to protecting our clients' privacy: do we enter a client into HIFIS at all? Have they given us permission to collect any information about them?

Reference Materials

• HIFIS 4 Implementation Guide, Section 1.2