‘It’s Not Like a Job Nor Training”: Surgical Residents and Their Unique Data Privacy Needs

Studies of data collection in the workplace or educational environments have highlighted concerns around privacy, autonomy, and negative performance impacts of unmitigated data surveillance. However, key differences in the perspectives of that surveillance by workers and students has shown that while workers are reticent to the increasing workforce surveillance, students tend to not be concerned due to the perceived or assumed beneficence of educational institutions. In the following study, we look at a population at the intersection of workers and students: surgical residents. Like many health-professional trainees, this population is training on-the-job and there is an increasing number and forms of data collection systems being deployed as a part of that training in the name of performance improvement, feedback, and assessment. We conducted in-depth interviews with 14 surgical residents enrolled in seven general surgery programs in the United States to investigate their privacy perceptions to determine how they may differ from those that are solely workers or students. Our findings reveal they are unaware of how their data is shared and are concerned about data misrepresentation, fear of misuse affecting job security, and potential discrimination, but at the same time are trusting of their educators to have access to their data to provide better training outcomes. Through this empirical evidence, we highlight how medical trainees have competing needs for data privacy and use compared to those who are solely workers or students. To this end, we provide initial recommendations to address privacy concerns, correct misunderstandings about data use, and promote the adoption of privacy-aware practices in health professional training.