Instead Of Centralized Healthcare Records, Why Not Let People Store And Manage Their Own?
from the now-there's-an-idea dept
Last month, we talked about the balancing act between making your medical records more accessible to health professionals, but at the same time keeping them private. There are many attempts at making medical records electronic and centralizing them -- which is great for medical professionals to be able to access when needed, but raises questions about how secure they really are. At the other end of the spectrum, though, is the idea of more distributed health records. For example, it's increasingly popular for people to create and store their own personal medical records, which they can let a medical professional access with permission, but which also lets the person have much more control over the records. There's obviously some concern about the idea of giving too much control to the individual, but it seems like perhaps there's a better middle ground here where individuals have more control both over what's available in their medical records and who can access them, rather than trusting the entire operation to the healthcare industry. If patients could not only manage their own records (with certain limitations), but also be kept aware of who is accessing their records, there's a lower probability of misuse. Similar to the ideas of sousveillance or David Brin's Transparent Society, giving more control to end users to watch who's watching their info could prevent some of the worst abuses of electronically available health records.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No thanks
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Not always a good idea
I think letting people manage their own records would be a bad idea cause of this. The chance of false data would greatly increase.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
what your medical records say about you
she tried to get the medical records to see what was recorded in them by impersonating a nurse. she fialed and then had to enlist kramer's help as well. both attempts fail and the results are recorded in her and kramer's medical records. elaine eventually changes doctors, but her record of difficulties follows her with her altered medical records.
this is also an issue with military medical records. a record of your vaccines is kept in a file as part of your medical records to show what vaccines you have received (typhoid, yellow fever, small pox, plague 1,2,3) if you have a problem of some sort with a medic, those records will often disappear and you will have to repeat the entire battery of injections again and again.
in vietnam, an annotaion of "FWC" on your medical records (F**cked With Corpsman) meant difficulty at every interraction with medical staff. it was something akin to the scarlett letter, as medical screenings were often critical to the process of changing duty stations and trasitioning out of the military.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Safe medical records
When a person calls a med professional, the application should take two passwords 1. the medical professional himself and 2. the end user should enter the pin on the phone and the system should be able to get the pin and give access to both the medical professional as well as the end user.
If he/she goes in person obviously user can enter the pin in med professional's comp.
In this way the users record is being accessed only in his/her knowledge.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Not a good idea
records inaccessible if the person is unconscious. Not good. ]
The problem is that millions upon millions of people will then
access these records from insecure or insecurable computers.
(See recent discussions in re the apparent number of zombie'd
Windows boxes out there; NYT quotes an estimate of 70M,
which I think is about half an order of magnitude too low.)
Oh, not that the current keepers of such records have a
decent track record: they don't. But at least the scope
of the problem is relatively small. If it's increased to
(say) 200M people, then the problem will be completely
out of hand.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: what your medical records say about you
This is what us democrats have been pushing for, for the longest time with health care. There's no reason anyone should be in charge of any aspect of their lives. It's our job (as politicians) to govern and control everything they do.
Please help us achieve this FOR YOU! This is all in your best interest, and it's best if you realize that now, instead of later. Please vote Democrat and vote for Centralized and State Run health care! Thanks!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Why not
[ link to this | view in thread ]
WTF?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
My staff calls them to remind them to bring in their pill bottles, and copies of notes from other providers: probably only 15% remember to do such.
It sounds great on the surface, but very few people have the where-withall to actually take ownership of their medical care beyond just "showing up" for the appointment.
Now, if we can just get all the dozens of EMR's to talk to each other so one doctor can know what the others are doing/prescribing.
Cheers,
Doc Rings
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: WTF?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Medical records
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Digital Sigs
Files or records in your database would ideally be digitally signed with both the provider's sig and the patient's.
Now, the patient can put whatever he likes in his own database -- the self-added/edited records just aren't official.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: what your medical records say about you
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: what your medical records say about you
with such immense resources chooses not to expend them on
the provision of basic necessities -- two of which are medical
care and education. (Actually, the latter is more of an investment:
the very best one that it's possible for a nation to make.)
Our failure to do this has allowed the costs of both to reach
alarming levels, denied health to many, and impoverished the
intellectual base.
Strength does not come from fancy new weapon systems built
with 1000X markup by corrupt contractors; strength comes from
having healthy, smart citizens. It's there that we should spend
our treasure -- on our people.
However...the last serious, or perhaps semi-serious attempt to
move in this direction was derailed over a decade ago. Not
surprising: there's a lot of money in the insurance industry,
which means a lot of lobbyists and an enormous amount of
influence/campaign contributions. I was quite disappointed
that those pushing for it at the time backed off -- I'd rather hoped
they had the stones to ram it through. We shall see if another
attempt is made, and if those backing it are willing to put their
own political careers on the line to make it happen.
Personally, I rather like the thought of the greedy, selfish
executives of (say) Blue Cross standing in the unemployment
line. It is a fate they richly deserve.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Intelligent article
Basically giving ownership back to the information owner anyway and with a distributed model, security is naturally enhanced because you can't access thousands of records in a single place.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Intelligent article
if the endpoints (the systems that the owners are using to access the
information) are compromised.
And they're comprised by the millions upon millions; a NYT article
the other day provided an estimate of 70M zombie'd Windows boxes;
some of us think the real number is about 5X that.
Whatever that number is (a) it's growing every day (b) there is
nothing on the horizon to indicate that it'll be fixed and (c) the
new owners of those boxes are more than capable of effectively
harvesting the medical records (or the authorization credentials
which provide access to those records) off every single on of them.
So as poor a track record as the medical records holders have,
it's still much better than what we would see if we permitted
everyone out there to "manage their own".
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Personal Medical Records Management
[ link to this | view in thread ]