cb1000rider wrote: Oh boy. I'll help. Or try to. I don't know if this will make it better or worse:
Doctors are encouraged to go to electronic records by 2015. That's true.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no "universal" means for storing patient data. That is, there are many many different providers of software, but no universal standard. There is no central database on everyone. There are lots of little databases in different forms.
Yes, questions can be personal and may offend some people. Many of the personal questions such as ethnicity and sexuality may actually have a bearing on your health. After all, if you're American Indian, you're more predisposed to certain conditions than other parts of the population. And yea, your sexual lifestyle plays a part in your health risks too. Offended? Yea, we don't like to talk about it. Relevant medical information? Absolutely. Do you have to answer? No.
Records can be stored in many forms. They can be stored on local storage in doctors offices, they can be stored on remote storage, they can be stored on cloud storage. Personally, the loss of my paper medical records could be a problem and I'd be happy if my doctor would choose to store them digitally with a secure remote backup.. Yes, even cloud-based! I keep electronic copies of my dogs vet records as well as my own. It's massively useful when visiting a new vet or doctor to have it all with you in one shot.
There is substantial and significant legislation around how your electronic health data can be stored by companies. It's non-trivial. You can't just pump it to the cloud and be HIPAA compliant. Our legislators have shown good faith there. Course, we know that anything that is electronic can be accessed... Just like paper records.
Look I think.. well... I know that the NSA is listening. If the federal government really wanted to know my ethnicity, sexuality, or if I own a gun - there are much easier ways to obtain that information than from covertly stealing electronic health records. When those records start containing DNA tracing - or other information that can be used for national security, I'll wear the tin-foil hat with you, but until then, it's just not something that I'm going to worry about.
Three sayings come to mind...
1)If there is a potential for abuse, it will be abused.
2)Today's conspiracy theory is tomorrows headlines.
3)There are 2 kinds of data. Data that has been compromised and data that will be compromised.
That said, if there's no records there's no danger of them being used against you. It doesn't stop the many other potential methods for those that have the ability to find out what they want to know, however, I'm not going to hand it to them no questions asked.
Larry