DOVER, DE – In 1967, a well-known public service campaign asked, “Do you know where your children are – and are they safe? “Fifty years later, those children are adults and many are asking, “Do you know where my health records are – and are they safe?”
At the 7th International Summit on the Future of Health Privacy, held in Washington D.C., Delaware Health Information Network (DHIN) answered with a resounding “Yes!” Presenting to a broad audience comprised of privacy and information security professionals, experts from academia and government, privacy rights advocates, the media and the public, DHIN showcased the proprietary tools and services it makes available to every patient who receives medical treatment in the state.
Randall J. Farmer, COO of DHIN, speaking as a member of a panel titled “Patient’s Use of Health Information Exchanges (HIE): Do They Care?” believes patients do care, and that HIE’s play a critical role connecting patients more closely with their health information.
Farmer spoke about DHIN’s commitment, saying, “Our greatest commodity is not data – it is the trust of our stakeholders and consumers. We are charged with the sacrosanct duty of securing personal health information while also making it available as needed for care so that patients can receive coordinated, cost-saving and effective treatment.”
Farmer pointed to the recent launch of DHIN’s consumer advertising campaign, aimed at promoting awareness of DHIN’s role in supporting healthcare. He also highlighted several consumer tools that DHIN is launching to better connect consumers with their health information – including an SMS mobile phone text alert system, Health Check Alert (patent pending) that tells patients when a medical result has been delivered to a care provider and when their information has been accessed.
“The securing of personal health information is crucial,” said Farmer. “Medical information is an extremely valuable target on the information black-market, where it can generate as much as 20 times more revenue* than stolen financial information.”
Dr. Deborah Peel, president of Patient Privacy Rights, the summit organizer, noted that patients should request copies of their health data after every appointment or hospitalization because electronic records are not permanent. She explained that the electronic medical record industry is young and records systems are sometimes replaced, so health records may not be retained or lost in turnover. Physicians may not be able to keep electronic copies of their patients if they move their practice or after they retire because they may no longer ‘own’ their patients’ records.
“The EMR companies and hospital systems may own them or destroy them over the years,” said Peel. “But the most important reason to obtain copies of your records is that even the best-kept records contain errors, which can harm patients and affect health insurance coverage and costs.”
She continued, “The only person who can assure that records remain complete and accurate is the patient. Ideally, patients should have ‘continuity of care,’ meaning each patient should have one primary physician or health professional, who has known them over time and can recognize errors in their records. More often many medical providers access and add to patient records over time, so it’s crucial that they can access and safeguard their records, and why DHIN is so important.”
She also noted that “DHIN has the best reputation among health information exchanges in the country. They are now working to do even more, to give patients or family caretakers direct access to their data, which will be a tremendous help in assuring continuity and accuracy of records for both patients and their doctors.”
Tom Trezise, a long-time DHIN board member and chairman of the board of Patient Privacy Rights, was pleased to see how many patient-consumers attended in addition to the professionals.
“Patient-consumers are beginning to understand that they should have access to their own health records. If their doctor can see it, patients should be able to see it, too,” he said. “Now, DHIN is leading the way beyond our state borders, modeling how to communicate with patient-consumers to other state health information exchanges. Our goal is to broaden and deepen secure access to personal health data because that is what patient-consumers want and deserve.”
