U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: Medical records going online, privacy at risk

If you're thinking that today's New York Times story California Hospital Faces Sanctions After Workers Wrongly Looked at Patient Records by Jennifer Steinhauer couldn't happen to you because you're nobody, think again. That story about hospital voyeurs looking at health records of Maria Shriver (first lady of California) and actress Farrah Fawcett happened in the old world of "strictly" regulated medical records.

Welcome to the new world. Web heavies Microsoft and Google are vying with insurance companies and others to win the newest data sweepstakes-- storing not-so-much-regulated Personal Health Records on line. It's a massive issue and policymakers are helping to drive it with related domestic and international initiatives to encourage the use of electronic health records. Over at the World Privacy Forum, Pam Dixon is watching both related issues closely. As she said recently in the AP story by Michael Liedtke (via USA Today), Google to store patients' health records:

The third-party services are troublesome because they aren't covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, which just issued a cautionary report on the topic. [...] a patient who agrees to transfer medical records to an external health service run by Google or Microsoft could be unwittingly making it easier for the government or some other legal adversary to obtain the information, Dixon said.

The WPF report was written by leading privacy expert Bob Gellman. More on PHRs is in Michael Gerber's Washington Post story New Ways To Manage Health Data. And check out this from the World Privacy Forum: WPF Consumer Advisory: The Potential Privacy Risks in Personal Health Records Every Consumer Needs to Know About.