Pitfalls with digital health records
The more I hear about digital national health records, the more I worry about them with regards to security. Various interpretations of the new legislation in the 2009 Stimulus bill could mean anything from implementing something like SAFEHealth, a decentralized system, to something like Google Health, which would centralize medical records. I expect that a decentralized system will not be what the government will choose. Proper usage of a decentralized system would be fine, but removes a lot of the utility promised by proponents of electronic health records, such as the possibility of access to updated health records from anywhere. I’d like to start off with an alarming quote I found in this interview with Karen Bell, director of the Office of Health IT Adoption at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
TR: What about the public-health benefits? Systems that house large quantities of patient data could enable new types of research studies.
KB: Absolutely, that’s something I get really excited about. It will totally break open our knowledge base. For example, I have been diagnosed with low-pressure glaucoma, which is fairly unusual. No one knows what causes it. I would love to be able to search the system for anyone with this form of glaucoma and start to look for similarities.
