Electronic Medical Records, the Story So Far

StupidPeopleTrick writes "After the executive order signed in 2006, states are making strides with privacy breach notification but are struggling with enacting privacy laws and finding funding.
With looming deadlines to move to e-records and e-prescribing, where will the money and the privacy standards come from?"

Comments

Here in The Netherlands...

[thrill12]

...we are already starting with the "EPD" (Electronic Patient Record) this year.
Every citizen to which it applied got a letter in their home, from the government, asking if they wanted to object. For this they had to reply using the included form and a copy of their ID.

Until now, approximately 500.000 objections have been sent in.

Just last week, the government proposed hard actions against those who violate the "EPD", such as high penalties. Insurance companies are not allowed access to the EPD and doing so would give the patient an immediate right to go to a different insurance company.

Let's be frank - these 500.000 people understand the one and only true thing about EPD : once information is out in the open, you never going to get it back in.

Just a while ago I got my own medical file from my physician - I am in my 30s - which contained 6 pages of text...
That's not a huge load of information, and makes it very easy to copy. Once out, anyone knows my complete medical record from my birth onwards. A penalty against misuse would thus not work, it would simply be used to blame any messengers that stand up and find flaws in the security.

One such flaw was already found last year: most hospitals (yes - publicly accessible hospitals) don't password protect their terminals.
Argument ? In an emergency, they do not want to put up the physician with all those tough things like entering passwords.

I respect the ideas of your new president, but I think he should definitely think again when implementing this - information wants to be free.

Solutions ? Maybe give only the patient the private key to unlock the medical database. It was an argument here, but was quickly thrown away on grounds of "much too difficult" and "what in an emergency" etc. Until that solution is seriously looked upon, or at least until the security of it all is completely looked after, my vote against this would be a big fat "no way".

Re:Microsoft has done some good work on this so fa

[SupremoMan]

My father called the hospital the other day and gave them his name, and they asked "Is your social security number XXX-XX-XXXX?"

Ummm anyone else see a problem with this?