Medical Databases Offer No Data Protection Can This Be Serious?

I have browsed through another chapter in Garfinkel's Database Nation and am growing more paranoid and concerned each day, well at least while reading anyway. There was a section in the Chapter 6: To Know Your Future that discusses how medical databases are maintained with information about our medical records that could be used for other purposes. I was not aware that there are no laws that protect the safeguarding of our medical records. Literally, anyone in a doctor's office could maliciously use the contents of our records to commit identity theft or leak out information to outsiders without reasonably being punished. Well, that stinks!

Prior to reading this book, I always felt like it was not necessary to include my Social Security Number on medical forms for each doctor or hospital visit. It just seems odd to have to keep sharing something that is considered the current unique identifier that links so much information to me. When I think of how many doctors who I no longer see (e.g. specialists, unfavorable doctors, and doctors left behind during a move), then I wonder what could actually be done with my information.

I worry that because I am no longer a current patient that some individual privy to my personal data will discount my very existence because they do not have to see my face again or believe that old patients quates to old data that is not important.

It is overwhelming to think that someone can simply disrupt your life by going into your past to reveal some medical secret for which you thought was between you and your doctor and not be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This chapter and section reveals why it is so important for the laws to catch up with technology. I am always hearing about how technology law is becoming more important to that particular industry.

Still, I wonder if we will ever catchup or slow down long enough to assess the potential sources of problems that medical records databases among an infinite number of other types of databases present before we start thinking about treating their symptoms. I wonder what it will take. Perhaps, regulation will increase when information regarding a significant government official surfaces---of course if that happens then it may be an internal leak in a grander scheme of things, but that's another topic.