From the while-you-were-looking-over-there-here’s-what-they-were-doing-over-here dept., Rebecca Pifer reports:
Debate around establishing a country-wide method to link patients to their records has been going on for some time now, pitting the medical community, IT vendors and payers against some lawmakers and third-party groups concerned about privacy.
The House nod on the measure by Rep. Bill Foster, D-Illinois, to reverse the 23-year-old ban drew further warnings about the risk to privacy.
[…]
Opponents argue that, unless HHS creates and maintains rigorous safeguards, patient identifiers could be stolen or misplaced, leading to fraud, black market ID sales and long-term damaging effects on a victim’s personal, professional and financial lives.
Read more on Healthcare Dive. This opens up so many ways to misuse data or harm patients that it’s downright scary to me. I know that there may be times and situations in which a national identifier that could pull up all of a patient’s records could be life-saving, but does that justify the increased risk to everyone else?
Your thoughts?