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06/12/06
Privacy Issues Loom in Push for
Electronic Medical Records
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Patients of the land, unite! You have nothing to
lose but your privacy.
There's a growing national effort to bring medical
records into the 21st century by converting the
paper records now scattered in doctors’ file
cabinets to electronic records by 2014. It’s a grand
idea -– in many ways.
03/13/01 - A
New Kind Of Organ Donation Raises A Hard Question: When Does Life Truly End?
- Twenty-eight year old Kerrie
Harrington of Somerville recalls that Friday evening last October in
haunting detail. Kerrie and her mother, Paula were going shopping.
Paula was driving. Suddenly, she lost control of the car and it
slammed into the guard rail four times. Kerrie was unscathed, but
her mother suffered a devastating head injury.
12/06/99 - E-therapy is hardly
a bargain
- We've got e-commerce,
e-banking, e-pharmacy and of course, e-mail. So why not e-therapy?
11/01/99 - Site has all the
research that fits
- In the elite world of
medical research, Dr. Harold Varmus is at the top of the heap. He
runs the government's biggest health research engine, the National
Institutes of Health, and won the 1989 Nobel Prize for his
groundbreaking work on cancer genes. Yet Varmus, 59, has proposed
such a radical, power-to-the-people idea involving Internet
publishing that the rest of the medical establishment is at his
throat.
02/15/99 - No one's watching
on-line druggists
- It sounds promising: You
boot up your computer, go to one of the new prescription drug Web
sites, type in your name, health insurer, credit card number and
address, and ask your doctor to call or fax in your prescription.
Presto! Within a day or so, your medication arrives on your doorstep
by mail, UPS or Fedex. No driving to the drugstore. No parking. No
standing in line while harried druggists fill your order.
01/18/99 - For teenager,
`confidential' is conditional
- Adolescence is hard enough,
but when it comes to health care, teenagers are caught in a
particularly delicate bind. They're old enough to face the same
serious issues as adults -- contraception, abortion, depression,
alcohol or drug use -- yet not old enough to have the same
guarantees of confidentiality when they seek help.
01/04/99 - Promises and pitfalls
of cyber medicine
- You feel sluggish, dizzy,
distracted. In fact, you've been at work all morning and haven't
gotten a thing done. You e-mail your doctor, describing your misery
in excruciating detail. Your employer, quite legally, reads it, and
concludes you're not really sick, just goofing off. Now you're in
deep yogurt.
07/20/98 - Your health history
- up for grabs?
- Today, the federal
government is taking the first steps toward a national system that
would give each of us a single number or ``identifier'' linked to
every medical record ever kept on us. It's a prospect that privacy
advocates fear may destroy what little confidentiality remains in
the era of computerized medical records.
10/13/97 - It is a tangled
medical web they weave on internet
- A few weeks ago, a
35-year-old Connecticut man was stunned by his diagnosis --
scleroderma -- and even more surprised by his doctor's advice:
Whatever you do, don't check the Internet. ``It's not just that
there's misinformation out there,'' Dr. Ann Semolic an internist in
Willimantic, says she told the frightened young man. ``It's that
there are 100 different ways any disease can play out, but you will
just have one. Let's not worry about the other 99.''
09/16/96 - Don't take privacy for granted at infirmary
- You break up with your
girlfriend, blow an exam, start drinking every night, then come to
your senses: Your friends are right -- you're depressed and should
see the campus shrink. But you're freaked: Can the records of a few
sessions with a college counselor today come back to haunt you years
from now, like when you've just been nominated partner in a law
firm?
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Privacy
Issues & Internet
medicine
