Patient confidentiality: Live and dead

The medical profession in Taiwan was shocked by two incidents of breach of confidentiality in 2005. We attempt to show the lessons to be learned from these events. We reviewed in detail the two incidents and discussed various medical association codes of ethics. The important lessons that we have learned from these two highly publicized cases are, firstly, a physician must not disclose his or her patient's information without lawful authorization even after the patient dies and, secondly, a physician must not disclose without lawful authorization the medical records of another physician's patients regardless of the information source.