Googling your health - power to patients

How do we improve access to our medical reords?

Placing information that's as highly sensitive as personal medical records into the care of unregulated Internet storage systems is risky business, and it could open the door to all manner of marketing and false advertising people who are eager for this gold mine of medical information.
Unfortunately, the only way to safeguard against this sort of thing is to get the government involved … and while I'm not fool enough to believe that the Federales cannot get their mitts on your personal medical records if they really want them, I'm incredibly uneasy about handing over stewardship of medical records to the government.

The authors of this article are doctors after my own heart. As Dr. Isaac Kohane, one of the authors said, "I'm a great believer in patient autonomy in general, but there is going to have to be some measure of limited paternalism."

One potential solution to this problem would be to extend the HIPAA to cover Internet players like Microsoft and Google. This seems to be the quick and easy solution to the problem. But what worries me is, as Dr. Kohane called it, the idea of "limited paternalism."

If you've been paying attention, you're well aware that once a government department or bureau is created, it grows. There's nothing at all "limited" about any government organization. I'm always suspicious of central authority, especially when the government has, in my humble opinion, such a bad track record with healthcare bureaucracies (as you know, my favorite example is the FDA).

But does the government really need to get involved? After all, every day millions of Americans already trust incredibly personal information to Microsoft and Google's care in the form of emails through free webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail – this is merely the electronic form of the mail handled by the U.S. Postal Service, and it is often just as sensitive (if not more so) as medical records. Emails sent via Hotmail and Gmail routinely contain loads of personal and financial information. And yet this never seems to be compromised by Google or Microsoft.

I say leave Uncle Sam on the sidelines on this one. The security for personal medical records is already in place – Microsoft and Google are more than ready to safeguard Americans' medical records. They have the unique opportunity to usher in a new age of empowerment for patients all over the country. Let's give them the chance.

Power to the patients!
William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.