Over on HealthBlawg, David Harlow has a thoughtful commentary on the revelations of a huge DNS security hole for the adoption of EHR and PHR. An excerpt:
Providers that have not adopted EHR systems to date could use this sort of news as an additional excuse to try to delay the inevitable. A study published in the NEJM a couple of months ago found that the reason most often given for lack of EHR in a practice is cost. (One commentator takes issue with that conclusion. I’ve also posted in the past about issues other than cost that stand in the way of EHR adoption.)
On the PHR front, this sort of news could scare off many people from uploading their health data into Google Health or Microsoft’s HealthVault.
However, the bottom line is that there is clinical value to using electronic health records and personal health records, and to the extent that providers and patients see that value, the benefit can be weighed against the cost of a potential security breach.