Should We Allow Any Company The Ability To Store Our Medical Records?

I honestly believe that storing my medical information electronically — through the internet no less — is a scary thought. I don’t care if it’s specifically to make it easier for a patient to access, edit, and review their own medical record. Making it accessible over the internet opens a whole slew of security issues. If a hacker wanted to gain access to that information then view this as making it THAT MUCH EASIER for a determined hacker to acquire.

Moving certain things to the internet makes sense. Moving private data that we want to keep private and secure isn’t one of them.

I for one, am thoroughly convinced it’s being done simply to make it convenient for an HMO or some other such thing to look at your medical history all in one place, naturally they’ll pay very well for access to gobs of records on tons of people, and it will be completely off the record that they’re doing it.

Insurance companies love denying claims, if you don’t think so, look at Michael Moore’s “Sicko”, and see how people that just get turned down for life saving treatment here get flown to CUBA to get proper treatment, something is very very wrong when a healthcare program put into place by Fidel Castro’s government is accepting medical refugees from the United States healthcare system. (I’m sure Castro thought so too)

But this just shows why we need national healthcare, administered by a government program that isn’t interested in finding slimey excuses to not save people’s lives so they can continue to be fat cats, basking in obscene profits while the dead cancer/AIDS/diabetes/insert disease here victim’s continue to pile up.

Whenever I think of an insurance company, I picture my dead body in a casket, and the CEO of that firm lighting his cigars on the money he saved by turning down my claim.

I share your concerns. I believe that this information will be used against the consumer for future claims.

You would think all the leftists here would state the obvious, electronic records save trees.

And my take on Sicko, you don’t think there’s any chance Fidel and Cuba accepted these “medical refugees” to make the USA look bad? Nah, no way right?

I agree with the “solution looking for a problem” statement. Both Microsoft and Google see all the money flowing into health care and they just want to get their hands on a piece of it. Google can only grow so big showing ads on search results and so has gotten involved in a host of other industries including health care and telecommunications. Microsoft is just trying to keep up.

I’m not sure if they add anything to the equation or not or if this will pose any additional security risk than we already have, but their motivations are clear.

I bet MS and Google will mine the health data in order to sell targeted advertising…like,

“Dear Mr. X, your recent lab results indicate that probably have Diabetes. We just wanted to let you know that “BlahBlah.com” has a sale on MedicationX until the end of the month. Please click *here* to go there.”

Pretty soon we’ll see if privacy can trump potential advertising dollars.

Records stored at your doctor’s office, whether paper or digital or both, have a layer of security that the centralized data bases do not. Inorder for a health insurer or other loosely medical related company to get a copy of your records, a request must be OK’ed by your doctor, who is bound by both Federal and local laws to protect and shield your records. There would be no such safeguards on massive centralized data bases….even the IRS can’t say your tax records are not subject to snooping by IRS employees and contractors.

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Security is most important in electronic medical software system. Because sometimes, the data in electronic medical software is stolen or misused.