Digital medical records and unintended consequences

Just like we "only need honorable, ethical people to make big government work," we just need "the right security measures" to assuage most of the fears about digitized medical records:

"It seems to me there is a big concern about the digitization of data as separate, but if we have the right security measures, that data is no different from the data physically sitting in my office," said Herb Conway, a physician who sits on the New Jersey state legislature. "Are we going to be designing laws that interfere with our ability to have interoperability?"

Mitchin said that digitizing health information creates more potential uses for the information and therefore more potential privacy hazards.

"The data today in electronic form is being used in ways it's not being used in the manual process," he said. "Do you, as a consumer, understand that data's being sold for secondary uses? I'm not sure patients understand."

There are many obvious benefits to digital records. They can be transferred very quickly and safely between health care providers, and future medical equipment will be able to directly access digital medical records. Well-designed software could make it far easier for doctors to avoid making mistakes by either alerting them to the danger of an action or even shutting down medical equipment in some cases. Then there is the simple ability of medical and billing software to more accurately show patients what they are paying for.

The privacy and liberty concerns, however, are legion. Insurance providers and employers are only part of the picture. Medical records would make an incredibly tempting target for government agencies looking for easy targets, and it's only a matter of time before they would start to gain full access to all medical records on a wink and nudge "need-to-know" basis. Imagine the DEA and local law enforcement being able to coordinate an offensive against medical marijuana users by scanning all medical records for prescriptions of medical marijuana. At some point, as DNA records are added to the medical records, it is possible that government may use that as well. If there is a genetic basis for anti-social behavior, it's only a matter of time before local governments start using these records to screen for these behaviors and put the kids who have them on watch lists. They've already tried this with psychology, and genetics would make a more effective tool for doing that.

As medical technology advances, the more that your medical records will come to look like a diagnostic of your body's entire state and history. You can't underestimate how much power that will put into the hands of those who have access to your records, and how many ways that that could be abused in the future.