From my America Out Loud Pulse podcast with Twila Brase – https://www.americaoutloud.com/the-truth-about-medical-privacy/
Do you remember those suspicions we had growing up after reading spy stories or George Orwell’s 1984? That feeling that someone was always watching? Those suspicions are fact in today’s medical environment.
Who would have thought that anyone but you and your doctor would have access to your private medical information? It is rare to find a doctor’s office that is not using electronic medical records. Your doctor has become a data clerk. Who would have thought that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Stimulus Act) would have contained a section on electronic medical records? The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act “to promote the adoption of health information technology” tied physicians’ payments to the use of electronic medical records.
And yes, the federal government is the overseer of those records. In 2016 the director of Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) was encouraging a change in the “culture of data sharing.” Karen DeSalvo, MD remarked that “for too long, and today, we think about data as something that we have to hold tightly onto; it is built into our DNA of medicine that we want to hold data and we’re worried about exposing it.” Darn right we are worried about exposing it! Data breaches have now become commonplace, with an average of 56.75 per month reported to the Department of Health and Human Services. In May 2022alone there were 70 data breaches, exposing the records of 4,410,538 individuals.
It’s creepy enough when it comes to privacy but the over-emphasis on electronic records affects patient safety. Since these electronic records have been mandated, doctors spend more time navigating records than seeing their patients. Worse, to streamline the process a lot of “cut and pasting” of chunks of the records goes on. This is a recipe for mistakes.
Today’s episode features Twila Brase who sounded the clarion call about the lack of privacy of our medical information the failure of HIPAA to protect us. As she puts it, “our medical records are an open book.”
