The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed by Deborah Peel, M.D., “Your Medical Records Aren’t Secure.”
Read the responses to it here. You may wish to have a barf bag handy when you read the comments by Mary R. Grealy of the president of the Healthcare Leadership Council. Let’s start out with a simple fact-check on her first statement:
Dr. Peel seeks to frighten people into believing electronic health records are more vulnerable than paper ones, which is not the case.
Of course they are, Ms. Grealy. When have you ever heard of someone stealing over 700,000 paper records and attempting to extort an insurer, as we saw with Express Scripts? When have you heard of an employee leaving over 2 million paper patient records in a car that were stolen, as we saw with the University of Utah? When have you ever seen anyone claim that paper records were stolen for the paper and not for the records? The vast quantities of data that are stored electronically mean that any single incident has the potential to affect many more people than a paper records breach.
“Overblown privacy concerns?” I think not.