Re “Your E-Health Records” (editorial, Feb. 1):

While it’s true that patient privacy and prurient commercial objectives can disastrously collide in electronic health records, the specter of doom camouflages other issues that demand consideration.

What about the outrageous cost of our health care system and the 45 million uninsured Americans? And the foreclosures and bankruptcy caused by medical bills? And let’s not forget that an estimated 100,000 lives are lost each year because of medical errors, and that there are large discrepancies in access to quality care across economic and geographic strata.

Electronic health records and patient privacy are not mutually exclusive. We cannot let concerns about privacy morph into paralysis. The stimulus package’s financing for electronic records will bring us technology innovation and job creation, better-educated patients, improved health outcomes and advances toward affordable personalized medicine.

Brent Gendleman
Reston, Va., Feb. 3, 2009

Link to New York Times Article

Privacy Issue Complicates Push to Link Medical Data

New York Times

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to link up doctors and hospitals with new information technology, as part of an ambitious job-creation program, is imperiled by a bitter, seemingly intractable dispute over how to protect the privacy of electronic medical records.

Lawmakers, caught in a crossfire of lobbying by the health care industry and consumer groups, have been unable to agree on privacy safeguards that would allow patients to control the use of their medical records.

Congressional leaders plan to provide $20 billion for such technology in an economic stimulus bill whose cost could top $825 billion.

In a speech outlining his economic recovery plan, Mr. Obama said, “We will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years all of America’s medical records are computerized.” Digital medical records could prevent medical errors, save lives and create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mr. Obama has said.

So far, the only jobs created have been for a small army of lobbyists trying to secure money for health information technology. They say doctors, hospitals, drugstores and insurance companies would be much more efficient if they could exchange data instantaneously through electronic health information networks. Consumer groups and some members of Congress insist that the new spending must be accompanied by stronger privacy protections in an era when digital data can be sent around the world or posted on the Web with the click of a mouse..

NYTimes - SlashDot

“Health information technology will succeed only if privacy is protected,” said Frank C. Torres, director of consumer affairs at Microsoft. “For the president-elect to achieve his vision, he has to protect privacy.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Peter R. Orszag, director-designate of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said electronic medical records could be more secure than paper records.

“If the files are electronic,” Mr. Whitehouse said, “computers can record every time someone has access to your medical information.” But, he said, the challenge is political as well as technical.

“Until people are more confident about the security of electronic medical records,” Mr. Whitehouse said, “it’s vitally important that we err on the side of privacy.”

The data in medical records has great potential commercial value. Several companies, for example, buy and sell huge amounts of data on the prescribing habits of doctors, and the information has proved invaluable to pharmaceutical sales representatives.

“Health I.T. without privacy is an excellent way for companies to establish a gold mine of information that can be used to increase profits, promote expensive drugs, cherry-pick patients who are cheaper to insure and market directly to consumers,” said Dr. Deborah C. Peel, coordinator of the Coalition for Patient Privacy, which includes the American Civil Liberties Union among its members.