Health care privacy

Lately we have been talking about health care, which has an enormous impact on basically everybody. one of the key issues we discussed was how to protect an individual's privacy but at the same time share their information among health care organizations. It's a very touchy subject; there are lots of factors to consider when making such a decision.

My own belief is that this information should be shared, regardless of the patient's feelings toward privacy. It is important, but keep in mind that the doctor you are seeing is trying to make you better in some way, and if that's the case, they should be able to see your entire medical history. I also believe most of the responsibility of knowing your medical past is your own responsibility. If you like to keep your information private, you'd better be able to tell your doctor everything, and some people can't remember everything, like myself.

One solution could be to sort of "de-identify" the data so that no old joe can just go in and see all your information. The Center for Democracy & Technology defines the importance of de-identified health data as "the trend towards adoption of health information technology (health IT) offers substantial benefits not only to individuals in terms of improving health care quality and increasing efficiency, but also to medical research, public health and other functions that derive value from large sets of health-related data." Although it sounds like a simple concept, it is hard for the industry to keep up with rapidly changing technology and sophistication of the data at hand.

Why not just assign an ID number to patients so when you need to give out your medical history, you can just give your doctor the ID number, and hope that he doesn't show it to anybody else. It seems like a simple solution except for trusting people you give your ID to. I hope that we find a solution to this soon. In my own opinion, if you just share your information on a need to know basis, you'll be fine and dandy.