Medical privacy

When will the healthcare industry and researchers get serious about protecting Americans' personal health data from hacking, theft, and sale?

The World Privacy Forum has published a new legal and policy analysis examining Personal Health Records -- or PHRs -- and the privacy issues associated with them. This analysis, Personal Health Records: Why Many PHRs Threaten Privacy, was prepared

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“We’ve put together a number of ways you can both control your private health records from the ground up and fight for the privacy of your health records from the top down,” said Patient Privacy Rights’ Executive Director, Ashley Katz. “And we’re just getting started.”  The toolkit will be updated every few months as needed.

But when state police start entering pharmacies to get full prescribing records of anyone taking a Schedule II controlled substance like Oxycontin-- as the Green Mountain Daily blog [hat tip to Daily Kos]

found that 35 percent of Fortune 500 companies admit to seeking and using private medical records to make hiring and promotion decisions. Other companies, including insurance and drug companies, data-mine such information for marketing purposes.

The way Peel tells it, her patients now include every U.S. patient, whose medical privacy is being unethically and even illegally invaded by healthcare’s paparazzi—the multibillion-dollar medical data-mining industry—and the pharmaceutical and insurance companies the data-miners serve. She also believes federal officials are hell-bent on promoting healthcare IT, but aren’t listening to patients' concerns that their most intimate information, once digitized, could be lost, stolen or stored and held against them.