SIVACRACY.NET: Medical Privacy, or Lack Thereof, and Profits

Deborah Peel, MD writes in an e-mail that is quoted here with permission:

Fortune Magazine lauds one of the nation’s largest data miners of medical records, without any awareness that one major reason for the corporation’s success (revenue of $88 billion/year) is the illegal and unethical use of Americans’ medical and prescription records.

Yes, they ‘wire the world’, but McKesson does so by ignoring strong state and federal laws and 2,400 years of medical ethics that require informed patient consent before medical records can be used, disclosed, or sold. Stronger state laws and medical ethics are supposed to trump the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which was intended to provide a ‘floor’ for privacy protections, not become the ‘ceiling’ for privacy. Instead, McKesson and the IT industry are ignoring state laws and medical ethics, because the unconscionable profits from selling medical data are irresistible.

McKesson’s CIO said, “So along with those records needs to travel the access rights that the patient grants for use of those records. Will someone ever view a medical record that perhaps they shouldn't have? They probably will, but in an electronic world we'll know that it happened. We'll know who did it, which is far superior to a chart lying around on a nurse's station for anybody to walk by and glance at.”

The CIO is wrong. Patients will never know who saw their records that shouldn’t have because: 1) audit trails are NOT required under HIPAA for routine uses and 2) under HIPAA virtually all of the users patients would not want to access their records have federal “regulatory permission” to use them without consent or notice. Further, patients are NOT granting “access rights” to their medical records. “Access rights” are otherwise known as the right of consent, which HIPAA eliminated in 2002.

Comments

I work at a medical library, along with attending library school, and I am constantly being reminded about HIPAA and how we must respect the medical rules. This is abhorrent, both from the point of view of someone who works with information, and from the point of view of someone who has spent a lifetime dealing with doctors and hospitals.

Posted by: Nani | March 4, 2007 06:05 PM

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