Ethical and Legal Aspects of Implementing Electronic Health Rrecords in Iran

In summary, this project was carried out in the following steps: reviewing the literature, determining the ethical and legal aspects of the implementation of the electronic health records, reviewing the existing laws and regulations in Iran, identifying the shortcomings and localizing the ethical and legal aspects of implementing electronic health records in Iran, and providing operational suggestions. By reviewing the literature, a list of ethical aspects of electronic health records was extracted and analyzed. Moreover, through reviewing the laws and regulations, it was shown that in the last decade, numerous and diverse laws have been passed in the field of electronic health, especially regarding electronic health records, and there is no serious legal gap in this field in the country. However, certain serious problems were observed including non-implementation or incomplete implementation of some existing laws and regulations, lack of sufficient technical and executive regulations and determining the examples of deviation from the goals of the laws and regulations or their correct implementation, and lack of implementation guarantee for some laws and regulations. Based on the studied documents, the current state of electronic health records in Iran was investigated from legal and ethical aspects, and operational suggestions were presented for its reformation and promotion.