Resources for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

Putting Health Records Online Brings New Challenges

medheadlines.com

Two of the nation’s leading medical researchers recently published an article that warns of new challenges that are likely to become raised when large non-medical companies, such as Google and Microsoft, become involved with the online storage of personal health records.

Online medical recordsThe doctors, Kenneth D. Mandl and Isaac S. Kohane, are both researchers and physicians at Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School’s primary teaching hospital for pediatrics. In their article, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers suggest the inevitability of a “seismic change” in the way personal medical records will be stored and accessed if they are posted online, a change bringing implications of stewardship and control issues that have yet to be addressed thoroughly.

Patient medical records are currently kept within the healthcare system that generates them. This information can be shared with other entities as long as some stringent federal guidelines are maintained. Researchers can access patient records, too, but they have no access to personal identities or other information that might identify a specific individual.

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