The “stimulus bill” will throw $20 billion dollars at an effort to improve health information technology (IT). The idea is that if patient health data is digitized and formatted in standardized ways so that the data is easily exchanged and is interoperable with different systems, health outcomes should improve and efficiencies can be obtained.
And that’s almost certainly true (although we don’t think for a minute that it ought to be done through a bill claiming to provide short-term economic stimulus).
But when you digitize and standardize data, you don’t simply make it easily accessible, but you also make is EASILY ACCESSIBLE, if you take our meaning.
Health care providers should be able to transfer information efficiently, and that usually means electronically. But creating centrally stored digital medical records creates the possibility—perhaps even the “opportunity”—that people in the government, and who knows how many others, will be able to access our personal medical information.
Yes, medical scientists want access so they can data-mine aggregated medical information for research purposes. And that goes on now, at least on a small scale. Sometimes medical researchers, after getting ethics committee approval, will blind the patients’ identity and use the aggregated information. (Often the information is so blinded that they can’t unblind it even if they wanted to.)
At the same time, some bees drawn to the collected data honey pot will not be so good-intentioned. So one question is whether government is competent to protect our information from ne’er-do-wells. Or simply put, can we trust the federal government to protect the privacy of our health data? The same federal government of which an employee left a laptop in his car containing health care data on millions of veterans?
Or how about the fact that the government estimates that there is some $60 billion a year in Medicare fraud? Government studies recently found that:
- Medicare had been paying claims filed by doctors who had been dead for years;
- Medicare had been paying bills from durable medical equipment companies (e.g., motorized wheelchairs, oxygen) to hundreds of businesses that didn’t even exist;
- The address of one company that billed Medicare for millions of dollars was … a utility closet.
And now, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, we’re going to trust this same government that leaks like a sieve with ensuring that our medical records are private and safe?