Just think of a very common health scenario. You are shopping in Sydney and a turning truck swipes you with its side mirror. You fall and hit your head on the pavement, rendering a state of unconsciousness. The paramedics arrive promptly and diagnose the case as critical. You are rushed to hospital under lights and sirens.
In the emergency department the triage team quickly determine you have a skull fracture and probable bleeding of the brain. They search your pockets and discover your driving license. Immediate surgery is imperative, but they have no access to your medical records. They need to know your medical history. They need to know if you are allergic to any of the drugs they may use and that is critically important when it involves an anaesthetic.
The police rush to your home address but find it deserted. Other family members are either at work or away and the kids are at school. To save your life the medical team has no option other than to proceed with caution. Your life hangs in the balance.
How much better if that hospital, having discovered your name and home address - could access your entire medical record and have it on screen for the doctors to study. That is the aim of the " My Health Record " plan undergoing construction in the Federal parliament. The aim is to have every GP visit. Every inoculation. Every script written to be automatically added to your personal health record from the day you were born.
Unfortunately, that is the very information that would enable a scammer to assume your identity and accrue debt in your name. To be of use that information would need to be held in a computer data base and we are well aware that hackers are constantly discovering new ways to penetrate even the most secure data systems. This risk factor is making many people hesitate to accept this plan.
It is suggested that access to that health information remain entirely in each persons hands. When they change their GP or consulted a specialist they would divulge their personal ID code to enable that practitioner access to their health record. Emergency access could only be obtained by a court order.
In the scenario described above, that would have a severe limitation. Going to court and finding a judge willing to grant access would take time. It has been suggested that health record access should be available to all registered doctors automatically, but this has limitations.
That depends if the doctor is working for the patient, or is the servant of a company which requires a health examination as part of the employment procedure. In this world of genetic coding health records may contain information the patient desires to keep private. That privacy concern comes into conflict with the need for fast and easy access in the event of a medical emergency.
The only reasonable option seems a guarantee that those who opt out have a block placed on their medical records being recorded. The vast majority of people have no objection to their health record being available to the medical people they consult and it saves them the task of filling out the history forms most doctors require.
Whether this valuable medical instrument becomes a reality seems to depend on the contradictions of politics. Whether the scare tactics of those opposed outweigh the benefits of having the entire medical history of each patient available at the click of a mouse.
No comments:
Post a Comment