Your Privacy and Offshore Outsourcing

An anonymous reader sends in a link to this story about medical transcription work and patient privacy. You probably recall the original story (from around October 2003), but the Chronicle here does a great job of tracing the entire chain of sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contracting.

Comments

contactors must be held responsible

[fermion]

The problem really is that subcontracting is meant to pass responsibility to another party. The person who contracts the work, as is the case woth, for example, Walmart or Nike, is allowed to feign ignorance and tends to be resolved of all responsibility. This situation, of course, gets worse as you move down the chain of subcontractors. It is a situation in which contractors are taking money for doing little more than taking a cut for mailing some paper.

The truly scary part is that the US government is trying to outsource everything as well. This includes the IRS, which means that your personal tax information is going to be in hands of some work-at-home person making $1 per transaction filed, stored on the computers on some half-assed system administrator. The original contractors will have no responsibility as the contracts will be written to require minimal due diligence and almost no penalties for infractions.

This of course has been defended as completely consistent with all current privacy laws. In addition, the somewhat friendly people at the IRS, a result of new regulations that resulted from the friends-or-Reagan audits, will be replace with the same people who call during diner asking you to buy their product, or yelling at your children because their parents did not pay a bill.

Re:Rather have it offshore

[rodgerd]

And you could then have her dealt with under US law. What's the US going to do to get the Indian? Invade? Shit, most of your Army's tied up in a country with 20 million people and no WMDs; the Pentagon isn't going to go after a nuclear power for the sake of your medical records.

Separate medical data from patients?

[fembots]

Wouldn't it make sense to separate data from patients? This is like Database Design 101.

So patient medical records can be transcribed by anyone without leaking the identities, and the patient details are held in another database.

So if someone wants to post a medical record, it can only go as far as "Patient DFA12435 has xxx, HA! HA!".

She is lying.

[SmallFurryCreature]

What it took to ruin her was her own greed. She was hired to do the transcribing. But instead of hiring her own people, checking those people, checking their work she outsourced it to a lower bidder.

This has nothing to do with countries and law this has to do with your privacy being handled by the lowest bidder.

Each step in the chain shows someone wanting lots of money for not doing anything. If hospitals and others were serious they would do the transcribing in house. But of course that is no longer allowed. Focus on your core capabilities has become the watch word. So that a place like a hospital is now really a meeting hall for outsourcing companies. From temp nurses to cleaners, from caterers to office staff. No one works for the hospital, they all work for the lowest bidder.

Neat eh? And the funny thing is? Medical bills only seem to go up. Why am I paying more insurance when all this cost saving is going on?