disease or even deaths at the hands of doctors committing murders, as in the Harold Shipman case). Abuses The outsourcing of medical record transcription and storage has the potential to violate patient–physician confidentiality by possibly allowing unaccountable persons access to patient data. Falsification of a medical record by a medical professional is a felony in most United States jurisdictions. Governments have often refused to disclose medical records of military personnel who have been used as experimental subjects. Data breaches Given the series of medical data breaches and the lack of public trust, some countries have enacted laws requiring safeguards to be put in place to protect the security and confidentiality of medical information as it is shared electronically and to give patients some important rights to monitor their medical records and receive notification for loss and unauthorized acquisition of health information. The United States and the EU have imposed mandatory medical data breach notifications. Patients' medical information can be shared by a number of people both within the health care industry and beyond. The Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA) is a United States federal law pertaining to medical privacy that went into effect in 2003. This law established standards for patient privacy in all 50 states, including the right of patients to access to their own records. HIPAA provides some protection, but does not resolve the issues involving medical records privacy. Medical and health care providers experienced 767 security breaches resulting in the compromised confidential health information of 23,625,933 patients during the period of 2006–2012. Privacy The federal Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA) addresses the issue of privacy by providing medical information handling guidelines. Not only is it bound by the Code of Ethics of its profession (in the case of doctors and nurses), but also by the legislation on data protection and criminal law. Professional secrecy applies to practitioners, psychologists, nursing, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nursing assistants, chiropodists, and administrative personnel, as well as auxiliary hospital staff. The maintenance of the confidentiality and privacy of patients implies first of all in the medical history, which must be adequately guarded, remaining accessible only to the authorized personnel. However, the precepts of privacy must be observed in all fields of hospital life: privacy at the time of the conduct of the anamnesis and physical exploration, the privacy at the time of the information to the relatives, the conversations