NY Times: Privacy Issue Complicates Push to Link Medical Data

Here's an excerpt from the New York Times article published 17 January 2009:

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 ....

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island ... [says] 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."*

For the complete article, go to Privacy Issue Complicates Push to Link Medical Data. Appropos to this article is a blog I published in May, 2008 entitled Personal Health Records, Data Portability and the Continuing Privacy Paradigm when Google Health was first offered.

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* emphasis added