To adapt to our increasingly just-in-time lives the Canadian health-care system is on an upward trajectory toward digitization. This necessary modernization of health care means better patient outcomes as well as improved insight into future health-care decisions.
Despite the personal and system-wide benefits of a more digital health-care system, what cannot be ignored is that your health information has value to you, but also to people wishing to take advantage or use the information inappropriately.
The fact remains that Canadians may also be unwittingly sharing their health information. Whether it’s apps that are used, mailing lists that are joined, or online surveys, what’s really being tracked is personal health information that tells unscrupulous users information you may not want them to know. If the fine print in the privacy agreement isn’t read and understood, it’s hard to know where your information goes and how it’s used. “Every time you give a little bit away you’re putting yourself at risk.”
Read more at Lethbridge Herald
John Robert Lyons says
In making decisions on the threats posed to their personal health information, provincial health card holders must consider the security trade-offs made by government health care system. Not only is misfiling of health treatments on a file a risk, there are other residual threats such as denial of a life insurance claim from failure to disclose health information on the record at the time the life insurance application was made.
Transmitting data is only one element of a secure health care information security. Don’t get hoodwinked by government claims of card holder security with a photo health card. The science is pretty clear. People relying on photo ID do not much better than pure change at correctly associating a photo ID image with the presenter, and even worse when the person is from a different race. Secondly, outlier corrupt billing providers don’t need a patient to bill the system. All they need is valid health number and version code.
Finally it is not if the record system is compromised. It is about when it is compromised and how much information can be stolen when security is breached. And it is no only about technological compromises, occupational fraud and corruption (threats from the inside) are also real. Think about how much information can be taken from a government office on a memo stick by a rogue employee making bad choices and either.
misplaced, or sold.
It is a lot more complicated than consumers protecting their personal identifiers.