By Brian
I’m gonna take a page from the Ezra/Kate book real quick. As one of them may or may not have noted in the past month (I’m an avid reader, guys…I swear), a new and controversial program has been forced upon clinical laboratories in New York. The gist is simple and sounds pretty benign: the results of every blood-sugar test performed in the city must be reported to local health officials so that, when they come across a patient with diabetes, or with risk factors for diabetes, or who ate a candy bar an hour before their test, they can send treatment suggestions to doctors who might not be following first protocols. This, by circumventing often cumbersome privacy regulations, could save lives and improve clinical care quality across the board, so it’s largely good news, right? I mean, Phil Longman came out in favor of it!
But the issue's actually much more complicated than it appears at first blush.
I agree with Phil here: “Medical privacy is not free. Lack of free-flowing information in the health care system drives up the cost of health insurance and contributes to the problem of the uninsured. For the population as a whole, it impedes the safe and effective practice of medicine, retards development of medical protocols based on science, and in all these ways and more reduces productivity and life expectancy.”
In fact, I’ll one-up him. The relevant privacy rules here, the federal regulations enshrined by HIPAA, have probably indirectly caused patients to suffer and die because of their confusing and backward priorities. They’ve—at least in their early stages—bungled the old channels through which medical information has historically been allowed to flow by erecting barriers to care providers and researchers while, as the New York City law demonstrates, making allowances for government officials and, yes, marketers and insurers. At its worst it’s a steel cage for people who have every reason to access medical records and Swiss cheese for those who don’t.
Here’s an example:
