Privacy Issue Complicates Push to Link Medical Data
New York Times
Published: January 17, 2009
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.
Representative Edward J. Markey said strong privacy protections were needed to prevent “a nightmare for consumers.”
Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff-designate, said it was “essential” to protect personal health information.
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..
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“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.
