Concept of Operations: Relating to the introduction of a Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record System
3.2.7 Withdrawal
Participating individuals (or their authorised representatives) may choose to withdraw at any time. If an individual withdraws, their PCEHR will be ‘de-activated’.
In a ‘de-activated’ PCEHR, any information that has been collected up to the point of being de-activated will continue to be stored, but the PCEHR will not be accessible via the PCEHR System to any healthcare providers, the individual, or their representatives. Records will only be accessible via the PCEHR System operator for maintenance, audit and other approved purposes.
Any information that a healthcare organisation has obtained from an individual’s PCEHR and added to their local records before the PCEHR has been de-activated will continue to be available to those healthcare providers through their local record.
After a cooling off period (initially proposed to be 90 days), information within a de-activated PCEHR will be archived and retained as per the retention policy described in Section 4.2.4.
If an individual chooses to re-activate their PCEHR during the cooling off period, the individual will be given the option of restoring their record to its previous state prior to de-activation or starting again with a ‘clean’ PCEHR.
After the cooling off period, a reactivated PCEHR will start ‘clean’ and access to previously collected information will not be available to the individual.
