Kaiser To Put Patient Records Online
from the making-all-your-data-available-to-hackers-24-hours-a-day dept
Healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente has been working to be at the forefront of technology innovation. They’re the ones, after all, who bought Webvan’s old warehouse to better facilitate the shipment of medicine. However, it worries me a bit to hear that they’re going to put all of their patient records online so that patients and medical staff can access them easily, 24 hours a day. All I can think of is that it also means plenty of other people will also figure out ways to have access to the same medical records 24 hours a day. The fact that Kaiser even got in trouble a couple of years ago for accidentally emailing patient records to the wrong people does not make me very comfortable with their ability to protect my private information. The article wonders if such a system will help Kaiser attract new patients, but I could see how it would have the opposite effect on those concerned with their privacy.
Comments on “Kaiser To Put Patient Records Online”
Kaiser Schmeizer
I’ve been trying to extract my old patient records from Kaiser for over 3 years now. I almost look forward to the tecnology allowing me to speed up Kaiser’s failing-to-be-useful experience.
An example
of why the health care industry has been slow to adopt modern IT. There are a great many legal and technical obstacles. Most DB software (out of the box) doesn’t work too well for health care records, with all of its legal and scientific nuances. It would be nice if docs or nurses could walk around with digital clipboards, but the makers of notebook-class PCs are usually reluctant to add the necessary interfaces for specialized health care databases.
The free market in this field has served to fragment everything all the more. There has been an attempt to build a standard industry data protocol called DICOM, but it is bulky, slow, and unwieldy.