I am Iddo Post. After a career in accounting and job placement within the financial sector, I found my passion in mental health. Everyone can experience unpleasant things in his or her life. From Mind to Move, we help people who suffer from psychological symptoms as a result of traumatic events. It is very rewarding work to enable people suffering from these destabilizing psychological symptoms to regain better balance and even to recover from them.
Why is privacy important?
We have the data of vulnerable people. This data must stay in the right hands and be used for the right purposes. There is a reason that medical confidentiality exists. I also think that in this sector, many people subscribe to the importance of privacy.
What does privacy look like in your practice?
Compliance in practice can be a challenge, though. Keeping a register, possible data breaches and requests for access, after all, must be done in addition to your daily work. In day-to-day practice at Mind to Move, we use the usual systems as much as possible and try to deviate from them as little as possible. So the Electronic Patient Record for patient information. And we mail with secure mail solutions. The risks are mainly in the information flows that deviate from the usual. Or the use of new applications such as electronic signing.
We still use Excel for the processing register. We do see that as our organization continues to grow, that solution will no longer work well. Then a privacy management tool, such as Privacy Nexus, will become a prerequisite. So that we have an even better overview of our data processing.
How about the people who say they have nothing to hide anyway?
Especially in mental healthcare, it is clear that sometimes people go through things that they don't want to be confronted with later. It is precisely at vulnerable moments that it becomes clear how important it is that not just everything is available to everyone. Especially if you can link all that information to other data points and build profiles from it or draw all kinds of unwarranted conclusions from it.
We are seing that in our sector patient data is being exhanged with insurers. There too, of course, only the minimum necessary should be exchanged.
How do you look to the future?
I do find it interesting what will happen with all the technological possibilities. On the one hand, the opportunities it offers to help people better. Look at EMDR therapy where technology also helps tremendously. And on the other hand, the risks that technology can bring, by pigeonholing people or data that you lose control of because it is processed in other countries.
