Medical confidentiality breaches on Twitter by anesthesiology, intensive care HCWs

Editor's Note

This French study examines the rate of medical confidentiality breaches in tweets by anesthesiology and intensive care healthcare workers (HCWs).

Data from 431 tweets with photographs and 9,000 text-only tweets from 1,831 accounts were included in the analysis.

Among the findings:

• There were 44 (10.2%) breaches of medical confidentiality among the photographs and 76 (0.8%) among text-only tweets.
• The 120 problematic tweets came from 96 profiles (5.2%)—3.7% of North American profiles and 6.3% of profiles from other areas breached medical confidentiality.
• Accounts with breach of medical confidentiality tweets had more tweets and followers than those without.

The findings show a significant proportion of tweets with breach of medical confidentiality among anesthesiology and intensive care HCW accounts, the researchers say.