[ Monday, February 20, 2006 ]
EHRs + Interoperability = RHIOs. David Brailer is
speaking at the HIMSS annual meeting, and is pushing the need for EHRs to be able to communicate with each other so that a patient's health information can be shared by all of the various potential providers of care to that individual. That idea effectively creates a "regional health information organization" that is responsible for the network. Of course, allowing every possible emergency room that you might end up in and every physician who might be treating you to have access to your whole medical chart is a good thing for patient care; but if a bad actor can access one point on a network and easily travel over the whole network to access all that information, it could be used for bad purposes. So interoperability is bad for privacy.
Hmm. This has me thinking. I have a modest proposal: de-link social security numbers from healthcare. Push for individual identifiers that are not related to social security numbers.
Let me mull this over, but I think that's a light bulb over my head. . . .
Jeff [10:31 AM]
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