Confidentiality in the emergency department

The ideal of patient confidentiality has mutated over the last several year s to accommodate the factors that infringe upon its meaning; such as expand ing health care information technologies, physical environments that promot e breaches of patient privacy, and health care workers who are unaware of h ow their routine behavior infringes on patients' right to privacy. This art icle examines the various ways in which confidentiality is breached in the emergency department and the legal issues involved, and explores options fo r the improvement of patient privacy for physicians and other health care p rofessionals.