Ethical Problems in dealing with Patient-Identifiable Data in Spine and Spinal Cord Research Activities

Abstract

The national diet has proposed and is taking care of a new law in terms of dealing with private data for the adaptation of rapid changes in computer technology and the society. Patients in a research study should give their consent to the use of data that preferably should not identify them directly. By these restrictions, the long-standing common law delineating the duty of doctors to observe strictly the confidentiality of their patients, intrinsic in the Japanese constitution as well as the Helsinki Declaration, may be supplemented by restrictions on processing electronic and paper based records. The Seventh Division of the Science Council of Japan asked that this preliminary law should be modified along with the existing common laws so that authors working in the field of spine and spinal cord research activities observe ethical rules in dealing with patient-identifiable data, similar to the other surgical fields. The three main Japanese societies whose scope includes spine and spinal cord diseases did not have any rules as far as contributions to their official journals, nor presentations at their meetings, nor in their regulations. Sixteen domestic journals out of 50 and 32 overseas journals out of 50, respectively, in the surgical field provide ethical regulations in terms of contributions to these journals. The current study concludes by proposing that Japanese physicians should take into account the protection of privacy in dealing with patient-identifiable data while the new law is under modification.