How Confidential Are Patient Records?

Patients, in the past, almost universally reported loving and trusting their doctors.

So, what is going on now when 70% of Americans report that they distrust health technology, according to Gienna Shaw, writing for Fierce Healthcare.

Patients believe that mobile apps and electronic health records have a high rate of failure when it comes to keeping information private and secure. Almost 90% of patients reported withholding health information during a visit to their health care providers. These dismal results were obtained through a Black Book survey of more than 12, 000 adults.

What did the respondents fear?

They feared that their pharmacy prescriptions, mental health notes and chronic health conditions would be shared with retailers and government agencies without their notice or consent. And 93% were concerned about the security of their personal financial information and believed that the system of copays exposed data from their credit cards and banking systems to tampering as masses of data passed from providers to payers.

Black Book’s Managing Partner Doug Brown, in a statement emailed to FierceHealthIT, wrote, “Incomplete medical histories and undisclosed conditions, treatment or medications raises obvious concerns on the reliability and usefulness of patient health data in application of risk based analytics, care plans, modeling, payment reforms and population health programming. This revelation should force cyber security solutions to the top of the technology priorities in 2017 to achieve tangible trust in big data dependability.”