Legal issues in the transition to electronic records in health care

In today's digital society, ongoing concerns about the privacy and security of personal data are ever increasing, especially in health care. While we gradually need higher electronic access to medical information, issues relating to patient privacy and reducing possible security breaches increase. In this paper, we focus on identifying the general rules and the regulations that are currently in place to protect the privacy and security of medical data, and more specifically information contained in electronic health records (EHR). This review is particularly important since EHRs are expected to become nationally adopted in the US by the next decade and are already underway in many European countries. Based on this legal overview, unresolved challenges are identified.