Right to be forgotten in healthcare: a scoping review

To conduct a scoping review of the literature on the right to be forgotten in healthcare and discuss its ethical, legal, and technological implications.

A scoping review based on the Joanna Briggs Institute method. The inclusion criteria were descriptive, qualitative, quantitative studies, and systematic literature reviews that included patients from health services on the right to be forgotten, between 2018 and 2025. Editorials, theses, dissertations, experience reports, theoretical essays, abstracts of scientific events, and books were excluded. The search was conducted in the PubMed, MedLine, and Web of Science databases.

Five articles were analyzed. One discusses a position statement highlighting recent data on cancer cure and social rehabilitation of patients; another addresses the right to be forgotten in transgender people; the third analyzes the challenges that the General Data Protection Regulation presents for hospital management; and two deal with the use of intelligent health systems as a means of applying the regulation.

The right to be forgotten may be essential for individuals who have mitigated situations of heightened health risk, but it may also conflict with the rights to memory and legal certainty. It is necessary to define ethical and legal criteria for deleting health data (right to be forgotten) and invest in technology that ensures the protection and integrity of information.