As stated in the earlier article, most clinics don’t realise how much patient information moves through their ecosystem every single day:
Clinics are not violating the law deliberately. The risk comes from normal everyday habits that were acceptable earlier.
If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, start there to understand the foundation of DPDP compliance for healthcare, including consent, data minimisation, storage rules, and shared responsibility.
Read Part 1 here → DPDP Act for Healthcare: What Every Doctor, Clinic & Medical Practice Must
Here are the most common unintentional violations we see:
1. Sharing reports on personal WhatsApp
Easy. Convenient. But unless consent exists, it’s a data-handling violation.
Use Case: The Convenient Forward
A doctor’s assistant receives a call from a busy patient requesting their recent blood work. The assistant quickly snaps a photo of the printout and forwards it from their personal mobile phone to the patient via WhatsApp. The Risk: The patient's diagnosis and identifier now reside on a third-party server (WhatsApp) tied to a personal device, outside the clinic's secure, controlled environment, violating security safeguards and purpose limitation.
2. Storing patient details in Excel or on personal devices
If a laptop is lost or a phone is shared, patient data is exposed.1
Use Case: The Lost Laptop
A clinic manager maintains the monthly billing list—containing patient names, services, and outstanding fees—in an unprotected Excel file on their personal laptop for ease of remote work. The laptop is stolen. The Risk: This single, preventable incident is now a notifiable data breach under DPDP because the sensitive financial and identity data was stored insecurely outside the official clinic system.
3. Using old patient data for promotions
Camps, offers, new services… If consent for marketing was never taken or the purpose has changed, it’s a violation.
Use Case: The Weekend Camp Blast
A dental clinic pulls a list of patients who visited three years ago for routine cleanings and sends them a bulk SMS promotion for a new Invisalign camp. The Risk: The original consent taken three years ago was for a routine cleaning and treatment. Using that data for a new, unrelated marketing purpose (commercial communication) without fresh, specific consent is a clear breach of the Consent Must Be Purposeful principle.
4. Using website forms without consent language
Most clinic websites collect data without: purpose notice, consent checkbox, or option to opt out. This becomes non-compliant under DPDP.
Use Case: The Anonymous Lead
A patient fills out a website form for a consultation regarding a sensitive issue. The form only asks for Name, Phone, and the message, with a simple 'Submit' button. The Risk: The clinic has collected digital personal data without providing the patient the mandatory Notice of Purpose (how the data will be used) and without capturing Clear Affirmative Consent, making the entire dataset collected through that form non-compliant.
5. Staff sharing patient info casually in groups
WhatsApp groups make clinics efficient — but they also create risk: Reports forwarded, photos exchanged, patient identifiers exposed. DPDP expects clinics to train staff and control access.2
Use Case: The Staff Huddle
A hospital's nurses’ WhatsApp group is used to quickly coordinate daily tasks.3 A nurse posts a photo of a patient's EMR screen detailing a challenging surgery to ask for a colleague's opinion. The Risk: This is a severe breach of security and access control. All members of that chat group are unauthorized to view that full EMR data, and the hospital has failed in its duty to protect personal data against internal, unauthorized disclosure.
6. Failure to Dispose of Data (The Forgotten Retention Period)
A key principle of DPDP is that data must only be retained for as long as the purpose for its collection remains valid, or as required by law (e.g., medical record retention mandates). Keeping data indefinitely is a violation of the Storage Limitation principle.
Use Case: The Unnecessary Archive
A clinic retains patient contact details (Name, Phone, Email) from patients who haven't visited in ten years, long after the legally mandated medical retention period has expired. The Risk: In the event of a breach, the clinic is held accountable for data that should have been deleted, resulting in a higher penalty exposure. DPDP expects a defined and executed data retention and disposal policy.
7. Digital Sprawl from Physical Records (The Scanned Chaos)
While physical records are outside the digital scope of the DPDP Act, the moment they are scanned, photographed, or digitized, they fall fully under the law's purview.
Use Case: The Unsecured Scan Folder
A hospital scans daily discharge summaries (containing diagnoses and treatment details) and saves the files into a common folder on the clinic network, intending to upload them to the EMR later. The Risk: This temporary folder is never password-protected and is accessible via a generic staff login. This failure to secure data during the digital transition phase represents a severe lapse in security safeguards and internal access control, inviting unauthorized viewing.
8 . Misuse of Marketing Analytics Pixels (The Invasive Tracker)
This is perhaps the most insidious risk for clinics actively running digital ads, as it happens entirely outside the EMR. Marketing tools often collect data that inadvertently reveals a user's health status.
Use Case: The Symptom Tracker
A specialty clinic uses a Facebook Pixel on its website booking page. A user lands on the page discussing infertility treatments but closes the browser before booking. The Risk: The pixel automatically sends event data ("User viewed Infertility Content") back to Facebook, implicitly linking the user's IP/profile to a sensitive medical topic. Since the clinic did not obtain explicit, informed consent from the patient specifically for sharing this health-related behavioral data with a third-party ad platform for targeted marketing, this constitutes a significant violation of purpose limitation and consent requirements.
Why Vendor Responsibility Matters More Than Ever
Under DPDP, your clinic is accountable for how external vendors handle patient data.4
This includes:
If a vendor mishandles your patient data, your clinic is answerable. This is why compliance can no longer be piecemeal. Your clinic needs aligned systems across both sides:
Conclusion: The Unintentional Cost of Convenience
The hidden risks detailed above are a direct result of prioritizing convenience over compliance. Every forwarded WhatsApp message, every unprotected spreadsheet, and every silent website form creates a liability that did not previously exist. The exposure is real, and the potential penalty—both regulatory and reputational—is significant.
The good news is that these risks are manageable. They don't require expensive hardware overhauls; they require process overhauls.
What’s Next? Building Your Compliance Shield
Understanding the risks is only half the battle. In Part 3: The Solution: Build a Compliance & Consent Aware Ecosystem, we will provide the actionable, step-by-step framework your clinic can use to establish the secure processes, vendor vetting protocols, and staff training necessary to achieve DPDP compliance and build a truly modern, trustworthy practice.
[The Solution: Build a Compliance & Consent Aware Ecosystem - Part 3 - Coming Soon]
