Background
Educators need new tools to teach resident learners how to evaluate the privacy risks of and utilize the benefits of smartphone applications with their patients. To address this need for education addressing the changing landscape of mental health care delivery, we sought to create a simple tool that can be used in the clinic. Through this 10-point assessment framework for screening health apps based from ethical principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we propose a method that educators can utilize to teach residents about the privacy concerns of utilizing smartphone applications as part of clinical care with their patients.
Methods
We utilized an ethical-educational framework we developed from ethical principles of the GDPR with a group of 27 psychiatry residents from two academic centers for a simulation exercise to assess harms of using smartphone apps with a patient.
Results
All 27 raters completed the evaluations, but only 24 reported a time record for completion of the evaluation. The mean time to evaluate the privacy policy of the sample app’s privacy policy was 434.2 seconds (just over five minutes). Percentage agreement of each question on the survey ranged from a high of 81.5% to a low of 48.1%.
Conclusions
In this study, we developed an assessment framework based on the ethical principles contained within the GDPR to utilize for education of resident learners around digital health privacy. This is the first framework developed for resident learners to help them understand the potential risks to patient privacy with the use of smartphone applications for mental health. The discussion prompted by an examination of a privacy policy through this framework highlights the need for further educational tools built into the residency education curriculum regarding these risks as use of these applications become more wide spread.