Many were leery of the campaigns to digitize medical records when the government first proposed the idea. Patient privacy was one of the first things to go, and it looks like the billions we’ve spent to make diagnosing illness in Americans hasn’t paid off. We are not receiving better healthcare, nor is the already-overburdened medical system saving money from the efforts to digitize.
Medical staff already has access to patient records, but once it is digitized it is available for anyone with a little cyber skill. One woman had her private medical records pasted all over the Internetrecently when an employee of a Los Angeles County emergency room snapped a picture of her when she was admitted for severe pain. Though this scenario is extreme, it exemplifies just how easily patient breach of privacy occurs.
And to what end? In Verona, Wisconsin there is a 1000 acre property dedicated to the company Epic Systems, responsible for the medical records of over 179 million Americans; in other words 56% of the country. The company’s annual meeting draws IT managers to an 11,400 ‘deep space auditorium.’
Epic has grown into the country’s leading vendor of software in the $9.3 billion electronic health records (EHR) sector, pulling in $1.8 billion in 2014 and expanding at a rate of about 1,000 new employees a year. Kaiser Permanente, CVS’s Minute Clinics, Johns Hopkins, and Mount Sinai all use Epic.
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Not to mention, it puts the patient records up for grabs & makes it easy pickings for identity theft.
ReplyDeleteNo but your records are now online for the NSA to view at their leisure. Everything that was once confidential is now government property. The end game is to be able to black mail anyone they want into doing whatever they want.
ReplyDeleteEpic is a corporation that we all should find troubling. Not publicly traded so limited info available to public. It's leaders are huge Obama supporters and Epic won big Obama care contracts. They are locking up the market by targeting the very biggest health systems. The information they control and can put to unknown uses is truly chilling.
ReplyDeleteKeep cheering.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure your stock portfolio is doing well, your pension still shows up, and your rental properties are yanking down huge bucks, so there's no need to worry about any "rights" or "privacy". Right now, anyway.
You cheerleading lemmings are in for a rude awakening.