| What we are now talking about with electronic health records is having each individual in the United States with a cradle-to-grave record kept, which follows you everywhere you go. This has really never been done before. What about concerns of confidentiality? For example, what about a 50-year-old not really wanting it to be known that he or she had an episode with drugs or depression, or being raped or sexually abused, or whatever, at age 15?
I understand the concern. While some might want to achieve such a comprehensive record eventually, at this stage of health information technology, it’s nothing close to that. There is not going to be just one location for somebody’s full EHR. What more than likely is going to happen is that your patient, Mrs. Jones, has a cardiologist, a chiropractor, a GP and a gynecologist. Four different doctors, and all four doctors have a separate EHR, using different software, but with the interoperability for these EHRs to communicate certain data between them, if the patient authorizes certain data to go between them.
That’s a key point.
Yes. The patient is still in control of what gets shared. So this leads to the advent of the PHR, the personalized health record. The patient will instruct the doctors to transmit their data to their PHR, that they are in control of. And then when Mrs. Jones goes to a fifth doctor, she can simply click the desired items, such as the obvious demographics, the history, and so on, and submit that to the fifth doctor. So now if she’s got an orthopedic problem and needs hip surgery, she can transmit the data that she chooses directly to that surgeon. That is how I see it happening.
There may be Big Brother people out there who want to have a master repository somewhere. But that is not even on the table right now, because it is widely understood that there is no way the American public would accept it at this time.
Daniel Redwood, DC, the interviewer, is Editor-in-Chief of Health Insights Today. |
