Story from a friend working at a manage healthcare company in the early 1990s.
The state published a set of anonymized data on patient care stays associated with workman's comp.
The company wrote code to correlate data from these scrubbed records (age, sex, treatment dates) with data it had, to identify the patients.
These days, much of healthcare business is oriented around data flows -- pharmaceutical dispensing machines which double as patient-data-and-dosing information capture devices. The drugs vendor is willing to sell the drugs at or near cost simply to capture the datastream and sell it back to the pharmaceutical companies.
There's very, very good reason to view EMR with strong suspicion.
The state published a set of anonymized data on patient care stays associated with workman's comp.
The company wrote code to correlate data from these scrubbed records (age, sex, treatment dates) with data it had, to identify the patients.
These days, much of healthcare business is oriented around data flows -- pharmaceutical dispensing machines which double as patient-data-and-dosing information capture devices. The drugs vendor is willing to sell the drugs at or near cost simply to capture the datastream and sell it back to the pharmaceutical companies.
There's very, very good reason to view EMR with strong suspicion.