PATIENTS of the land, unite! You have nothing to lose but your privacy.
There's a growing national effort to bring medical records into the 21st century by converting the paper records now scattered in doctors' file cabinets to electronic records by 2014. It's a grand idea -- in many ways.
If medical records were electronic, prescriptions would be more legible and could be filled more accurately. Public health officials could spot disease outbreaks quickly and track their spread. Doctors could speedily check a patient's record, helping to avoid wasteful repetition of tests and minimize harmful drug interactions and other errors, which kill an estimated 98,000 people a year in the United States. Scientists would have access to a gold mine of data about diseases. There could be other direct benefits too. If you're in a car accident in San Francisco, say, an emergency room doctor there could check your records in Boston to treat you correctly.
But the whole idea can be scary.
"I have spent 30 years seeing nothing but how people are harmed [in their] reputation or livelihoods when sensitive medical records are seen by anyone ... outside of the few people you trust to actually take care of you," said Dr. Deborah Peel, a Freudian psychoanalyst in Austin, Texas, and founder of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation (www.patientprivacyrights.org), a nonprofit group. "If privacy is not fully protected, we won't be building anything except the most valuable mother lode of information for data mining on Earth."
To be sure, paper records aren't all that secure, either. Anyone in a white coat can peruse paper records and no one would ever know. At least with electronic records, there can be "audit trails," to show who has peeked at what.
Still, do we really want to make it easier for more and more people to see sensitive medical data? We know now that personal electronic information on 26.5 million military veterans, including their Social Security numbers and birth dates -- and in some cases, health problems -- was stolen from the residence of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who had taken the data home without authorization.
In another example of the vulnerability of electronic records, we know that the National Security Agency has secretly been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. And we know that credit card information is vulnerable to hacking and accidental release.
