Medical Data Mining on Health Care Reports
You think that that your prescription information is private. In reality, prescriptions and all the relevant data — including not only the name, surname, the name and dosage of the drug, the identity of the doctor, but also the patient’s address and SSN# — are a goody bargained, bought and sold in a marketplace, often without the patients’ knowledge and consent. There are so many health related data of you in the past that you can not keep the record. However, computer systems keep the record. You don't remember, computers never forget.
In fact the academy is working on making sense of the accumulated data. Novel fields of data mining such as controlled medical terminologies, conceptual and object-oriented data modeling, databases, ontologies, semantic network, and vocabulary and schema partitioning, drug discovery and molecular modeling health care data management. As well as functioning systems such as AI, health care decision support systems, clinical decision analysis, eHealth Care Systems and Services exist. All to make sense out of your health care records.
If the data consisting of your past health care records and your used drugs is correlated to your DNA sequence there is a tremendous opportunity in disease diagnosis and drug target identification. It is both good for you and for the big pharma industry. The stimulus law provides $19 billion to push doctors toward installing electronic records systems in silico. It is a milestone on the road toward President Obama’s goal of digitizing all medical records within five years. But digitization creates the potential for more abuses by hackers, as well as blackmail and insurance fraud.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, IMS Health and WebMD see a lucrative business opportunity in assembling and holding personal health records. Patients and their doctors would be able to consult the whatever the records whenever needed.
On the other hand since 2003, more than 45,000 complaints have been filed at the civil rights office in the Department of Health and Human Services by people who said their medical privacy was violated. The office says it has taken enforcement actions on more than 8,900 cases in that period, covering millions of people.
To me you should be a patient, an unknown patient not somebody with a name and social security number. Even your doctor should have restricted access to your health care record. Maybe only for emergency cases.
Otherwise the system will be a whole mess.
If I were on PatientslikeMe.com I would only go for it with a login ID.
Anyway, It is going to be a new era for health care. We will watch and see in the following years.
