This popped up a few days ago.
WikiLeaks Breach Raises Concern About Privacy of Electronic Medical Records
Published December 07, 2010 | FoxNews.com
The embarrassing leak of a quarter-million State Department documents by WikiLeaks has recharged the debate over electronic medical records, raising concern that the government may not be capable of safeguarding Americans' most intimate health care secrets when their records go digital.
Doctors and privacy advocates alike are pointing to the havoc wreaked by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allegedly Bradley Manning, the low-level Army private accused of facilitating it, in arguing that the government needs to slow down its push for digital medical records.
The Obama administration is calling for all doctors and hospitals to go digital by 2014 or, if they're in the Medicare system, face penalties starting the following year. The 2009 stimulus bill pumped billions of dollars in incentives into this effort, while this year's health care law set up more programs to encourage the use and study of digital dossiers.
The goal is to reduce costs and medical errors by making this information accessible, presumably to the right people at the right time. But as the WikiLeaks fiasco showed, the bigger the network grows the more likely it is that the wrong people can take advantage of it.
"Even the most top-secret things can't be kept secret," said Dr. Alieta Eck, who with her husband runs a clinic near Edison, N.J., for the poor and uninsured. Eck said she keeps electronic records for her office only but does not plan on meeting the new federal standards, citing concerns about how that information will be shared and how it could erode the trust she has with her patients.
"If you think WikiLeaks is bad, this is gonna be WikiLeaks on steroids," said Deborah Peel, founder of Patient Privacy Rights.
Peel, who has long expressed concerns about the digitization of medical records, said "everything from prescription records to your DNA" will soon be floating around, susceptible to hackers from the outside and troublemakers from the inside.
She cited a study from health care security firm FairWarning, which estimated that health care providers have on average between 25 and 100 privacy breaches per month -- absent the kind of monitoring system that FairWarning sells.
The Department of Health and Human Services has stressed the importance of patient privacy as it encourages medical providers to go digital. The department this year has been formulating the rules to carry out a provision from the stimulus law known as the HITECH Act, under which Medicare doctors are eligible to receive up to $44,000 over five years to establish electronic health records. According to the department, the new rules would strengthen patient protections by giving them the right to restrict certain kinds of disclosures and prohibiting the sale of certain information without their say-so.
Full article here:
For those who don’t know Fox News is owned by an American Citizen late of these shores (Rupert Murdoch) and reflects a political position that it would be fair to say would make Alan Jones seem like a deep red leftie!
However they point they make has considerable validity and should just not be ignored - especially when faced with a sceptical and increasingly rather alienated population who seem to be losing faith in the overall political and government systems to deliver for them.
They make the point just how well will the Government do with private Health Information if they can’t protect national secrets!
Any planning for e-Health that involves large aggregated data sets needs to be very well managed - and shown to be both well governed and well managed for there to be the level of trust we will need for success!
David.
0 comments:
Post a Comment