What this page is responsible for
Patient Privacy Settings is where an Administrator configures clinic-wide privacy and consent behavior for patient records. It doesn't sit alongside the rest of Settings as an optional convenience — it's the page that determines baseline expectations for how patient information is handled across the whole clinic, which is exactly why it's restricted to Administrators rather than visible to every role.
Think of this page less as a place to toggle individual features and more as a policy layer: the decisions made here apply uniformly to every patient record and every staff member, regardless of who's logged in at the time. That uniformity is the point — privacy and consent behavior that varies by which staff member happens to be working is much harder to reason about, explain to a patient, or defend during a compliance review.
- Who can access Patient Privacy Settings, and why it's Administrator-only
- What these controls actually govern in day-to-day use
- How patient record access is tracked separately, for accountability
What privacy controls actually govern
It's easy to assume a page called "Patient Privacy Settings" controls the logging of who accessed what — it doesn't. That side of accountability is handled automatically and separately, regardless of anything configured here. What this page actually governs is the clinic-wide policy layer sitting above that: things like consent expectations and privacy defaults that apply the same way to every patient and every staff member, so that patient data handling is consistent and predictable rather than left to individual judgment call.
Getting this distinction right matters in practice: if you're looking for a record of who viewed a specific patient's chart last Tuesday, you won't find it on this page — that's a reporting question, answered by the Audit Log. If you're deciding what your clinic's baseline consent posture should be for every patient going forward, that's what belongs here.
Accessing this page
Go to Settings > Patient Privacy. This page is only visible to Administrators — if your account is assigned any other role, it won't appear in your Settings sidebar at all, rather than appearing in a read-only or greyed-out state. See Understanding Your Role & Permissions for the full breakdown of which Settings pages each role can see.