Protecting Medical Data
March 05, 2009 (Economist)
A clause in the Coroners and Justice Bill, now passing through British Parliament, would enable ministers (i.e. senior politicians within the British government) to "remove or modify any legal barrier to data sharing" in order to fulfill policy objectives. The move would have to be proportionate and to balance the public interest against that of individuals. But it would override existing data-protection and human-rights laws and doctor-patient confidentiality.
Although the politicians believe that they have adequately built-in the appropriate level checks and balances, medical professionals think the only possible way to safeguard such vital and intimate information is to exempt health records entirely.
Balancing patients' privacy and the public interest is hard. Should a doctor who suspects a teenager is suicidal talk to the parents? What if a patient's medical records would help another person's defense in court? Though countries weigh such competing interests differently, they generally recognize that privacy, though important, is not absolute. British doctors will break confidence to save the patient, or others, from serious harm: when they suspect child abuse, for example, or by notifying the authorities if a patient who suffers fits or blackouts keeps driving.
But such decisions are everything the new law would not be: proportionate, limited and made case by case. Even when patients are sure that what they say will go no further, they can be too bashful or scared to mention personal health issues or problems. If they do not know who might be listening, they may clam up entirely.
Although the debate of legislating access to medical records or access thereof cannot necessarily be resolved by technology, per se, an underlying issue of health record security and accuracy can be directly addressed by the use of technology. YOUnite's patented technology offers a unique solution to the problems surrounding the issue of health information privacy through the notion of "distributed sharing of personal identity attributes". By applying YOUnite's patented technology to this issue, an individual would have the ability to selectively share any pieces of their health record with any specific entity or data storage destination on an individual and granular basis. Moreover, the individual could allow access of sensitive data to a third party without having to actually transfer that sensitive data on to the third party's network. Finally, the individual could permanently remove information from those third party destination stores by simply removing the permissions that originally granted access to it in the first place.
YOUnite's patented technology increases the security and accuracy in an efficient and cost effective manner, thereby directly addressing the potential serious issues of personal data security that are being discussed regarding health records.
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