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Social Security Administration Launches E-Health Info Exchange
Lucas123 writes "In what could be the start of a national health information exchange system, the Social Security Administration became the first federal agency to go live with a public-private electronic health records information exchange that will cut wait time for 2.6 million Americans who apply for benefits each year by weeks or months. The electronic exchange runs on a database operated by a non-profit organization in Virginia and open-source software deployed at the Social Security Administration. 'The goal of the NHIN effort is to enable secure access to health care data and real-time information sharing among physicians, patients, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and federal agencies ... regardless of location or the applications that are being used.'"
When you file for long-term disability with Social Security, they need to grab all of the recent medical records from your primary physician and all the specialists you're seeing. This process takes a long time, generates a ton of redundant paperwork (many dupes of lab work and such that went to multiple places), and isn't very accurate. I went through this a few years ago with my mother. One of the physicians didn't respond in time to the request they sent for more information, stuff that was pretty critical. We believe that was one of the factors causing her initial claim and first appeal to be denied.
That was over four years ago; her case is just coming up for the final review now. That's how big the backlog is here, and medical records processing time is one of the big drivers to the process.
At the point where you're applying for Social Security disability, your medical records are no longer really private anyway. They're going to scour everything available to confirm that what's happened to you is both permanent and real.
This accurately describes how states currently handle immunization registries. The CDC sets up federal reporting guidelines, but each state has its own registry implementation. This leads to all sorts of fun when trying to do stuff like transfer records when people relocate to another state, or tracking disease infection rates across state lines.
I'm not saying that having a national medical database is necessarily a good thing, but it's immeasurably better than having individual state repositories.
While I agree with your sentiment about doctors (after all, their expertise is medical (chemistry, bio), not technical). However, I am betting that your comment about hospital info security is borne from not having worked in such an environment.
Having run the IT side of a hospital's foundation, and having to interface with their network security, I can say that most definitely they are very competent with data security. Now mind you, this is in Canada -- but I doubt the competent sys admins are only born north of the border.
Hospitals (and the several sys admins I have known that run them) are very much on top of their game -- even the the point of being a pain in the ass to work with (which is both good and bad). Many doctors and nurses absolutely hated the arcane network security protocols in place, but they worked, and the hospital network maintained triple-9 uptime.
Take my anecdotal evidence with a grain of salt, but from my experience, hospital networks are QUITE secure.