As prisons take steps to implement electronic health records, debate is stirring over whether mining inmates’ medical data would violate their privacy, ABC News reports.
Putting EHRs in Prisons
In a 2010 audit, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice recommended that federal officials gather analytical health data on inmates to curb rising health care costs in the federal prison system.
David Fathi — director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project — said paper records create challenges for prison doctors because inmates often are transferred between facilities. Fathi said EHRs potentially could facilitate communication between prisons and “improve the quality of care in a prison system.”
Privacy Concerns
Research organizations often mine data from EHRs to advance medical studies. DOJ potentially could use the same data-mining techniques to collect information on health care in federal prisons.
Existing law does not require organizations to obtain patient consent before mining EHR data as long as the information is de-identified, meaning that it does not include personal information such as last names or addresses.
However, some privacy advocates have expressed concern that de-identified data sometimes provide enough information to identify an individual.
Fathi said, “The most important question is whether the information remains identifiable.” He added that ACLU is not worried about the mining of prison EHR data, as long as the information cannot be used to identify particular inmates (Ono, ABC News, 5/24).
Source: iHealthBeat
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