PoLiX Posted February 23, 2008 Report Posted February 23, 2008 http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2008/0...ne-cabinet.aspx Are you one of those crazy Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) early adopters who uses all of its services, from Gmail to SketchUp? Or perhaps you're just a shareholder trying to figure out how the Internet giant is going to make money off of the health-care field? Direct your thinking to medical records, and then get ready to wait. Perhaps you won't have to wait long. A pilot project involving electronic storage of and access to the medical records of 10,000 patients of the Cleveland Clinic is expected to take six to eight weeks. News of whether or when a future launch might happen could follow. mmm... dunno how this plans to work, but could be scary if someone could access it outside of you or doctors.
Samapico Posted February 23, 2008 Report Posted February 23, 2008 Does it store all your personnal info? Or is it more just to store like... symptoms, treatment, results, so other doctors can see if this is the good thing to do with the patient when these symptoms appear or somethingI'm guessing this is the primary purpose of this, but I also guess that it stores all the personnal info in the database as well... Things like the antecedants of the person could be important, but the name and such is pretty irrelevant anyway... I'm all for this if the whole thing is anonymous
Aileron Posted February 23, 2008 Report Posted February 23, 2008 I worked in a hospital for a while. The records were on the internet. The hospital I worked for was a little laggy as far as technology is concerned, so I'm sure internet records are used at most health care ins!@#$%^&*utions. It certainly isn't anonymous. Records must include a patient's name, SSN, and health insurance information.
Wild Luck Posted February 24, 2008 Report Posted February 24, 2008 http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2008/0...ne-cabinet.aspx Are you one of those crazy Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) early adopters who uses all of its services, from Gmail to SketchUp? Or perhaps you're just a shareholder trying to figure out how the Internet giant is going to make money off of the health-care field? Direct your thinking to medical records, and then get ready to wait. Perhaps you won't have to wait long. A pilot project involving electronic storage of and access to the medical records of 10,000 patients of the Cleveland Clinic is expected to take six to eight weeks. News of whether or when a future launch might happen could follow. mmm... dunno how this plans to work, but could be scary if someone could access it outside of you or doctors.it wont happen, doctors take a vote of confidenciality only another doctor can access a patient information. Just imagine, if everyone could know your psychiatric data, or your letal allergies. Or if you had an STD or abortions. That will never happen count on it 100%
»CypherJF Posted February 24, 2008 Report Posted February 24, 2008 Actually, I think it will become inevitable. I know for certain patients they would welcome a centralized database of medical records. For example, my one relative has to see numerous doctors for different issues, and each prescribe different medications. Sure, the patient needs to inform each doctor of the medications prescribed but would be best if it was in 1 central spot. It also would offer a complete chronological order of medical history as opposed to separate records for each clinic the individual goes to. If Google really wants this to work they're really going to need "to do no evil", secure the patient database, and not scan/sell the details of the patient to advertisers.
Aileron Posted February 24, 2008 Report Posted February 24, 2008 Obviously all health care workers are liable under the federal HIPAA act to keep all medical information confidential, and a database such as this would fall under that bill as well. I think what Wild Luck was referring to would be a security breach where some hacker, some quack, or minimum wage worker who has access, steals information from the database. That would obviously cause a certain amount of chaos, though people usually aren't interested in the medical condition of strangers. You might see cases of 'medical iden!@#$%^&*y theft' where people could use someone else's insurance to get plastic surgery, or use several people's accounts in order to get multiple prescriptions of the same drug. All anyone could do with that is keep the database as secure as possible and hope for the best. Really, its a case of encrypting it enough that it's more profitable for a thief to look elsewhere. That's actually pretty easy, because medical records information can't be directly turned into cash. It would be far more cost-effective to steal product secrets from corporate databases and sell those to a compe!@#$%^&*or.
ThunderJam Posted February 25, 2008 Report Posted February 25, 2008 mmm... dunno how this plans to work, but could be scary if someone could access it outside of you or doctors.Won't be able to. Theres really strict laws about how confidential any medical information that can identify individuals must be kept. I intern at the National Library of Medicine where we got the servers that run sites like medline, and getting into the server room requires a retinal scan and other stuff for this very purpose.
Recommended Posts