Is Your Medical Information Safe?

A few random thoughts on this topic:

1. Security breaches can and have occurred in the past. There is no reason to believe they will not happen in the future.

2. Record keeping has never been the strong suit in medicine. Digital records may be a step up from the classic "doctor's handwriting", but in many cases, making the scribble legible will not make it an adequate record.

3. Medicine is a syndicate: a brotherhood where there is an obligation to uphold and defend your colleagues' opinions and actions. Medical judgement is influenced by knowledge of a prior medical judgement. Digitally circulated records, as such, may obstruct patients from obtaining an unbiased second opinion.

4. There have been numerous scandals in recent years, about medical test results which were afterwards found to be incorrect - on a significant scale. Physical samples cannot be digitized: written reports are the easiest and most accessible records for digitizing. If written reports are digitized without some representation of the actual data on which they are based, this is a problem. If data can be digitized, at minimum, as images, then errors will come to light, and this is a good thing. However, written reports without data for verification will be taken at face value, and assumed to be true when they are not verifiable. The assumption that the medical record has a 'truth value' is overrated - even when it comes to supposedly objective and scientific tests.

5. The potential benefit to medical science, of having a giant database of everybody's medical records, is pretty well subverted by the above points about record keeping, as well as the fact that performance of tests and keeping of records are not homogenous in the "sample". What new "statistical facts" will be drubbed up out of this dross and flogged to the public as a medical truth?

When I am given a prescription by my "Primary Healthcare Provider" for a 30 day trial of a particular medication, which I fill at the local pharmacy, I am contacted that evening by a person representing the mail order prescription service I am compelled to use by my insurance company. This representative has before him or her, on a computer screen, my entire prescription history (including the latest one) They then proceed to advise me that I can get a 90 day supply of the one I just had filled.

I then have to explain (at least twice) that this was prescribed on a trial basis.

The lack of comprehension exhibited by this Representative, who has access to my medical records, gives me concern for the safety of my medical information.

In the beginning of my dealings with the mail order company, I had concerns over the effect weather extremes would have on my medications as they sit in my mailbox outside until I come home from work. They connected me with their pharmacist who advise me that there is "minimal effect on medications by temperature extremes".

I asked this pharmacist for her license number and was refused.

We had a fax on a separate line until a few years ago at home. It was one digit off from a reproductive health clinic's number. I destroyed all the incoming faxes, but the stuff that was there! There is no such thing as privacy. Only it's illusion. Milo