Access to Your Own Health Data

Marcellus Shale - Like the Wild West

I saw an article over in Information Week about accessing your health care data.  Basically right now you can't.  You can't see test results, doctors notes, assessments, treatment history, anything.

Of course the information is all there - usually in thick files hanging on the wall somewhere - but you can't use it.

Imagine if car repair worked the same way.

You take the car in, the mechanic looks it over, "hmmmm" he says, take it over to Bob's Auto Yest and have him do this.

He hands you a cryptic sheet.

You go to Bob's.

Bob hooks up wires and tubes to the car, runs some machine and says "Oh no."

"What's the matter?" you ask.

"Nothing you would understand," says Bob.

He scribbles on more paper, hands it back and says you'd better have your mechanic look check this right away.

"Oh," he says, "and here's a bill for $350.00."

Back at the garage the mechanic takes the paper from Bob's and looks it over.

"No, no," he says, "that's not right."

"Here," he says to you, "take it Frans and this time have Fran check this the way I wrote it down..."

You get another cryptic piece of paper...

And on it goes.

How long would you put up with this?

No information about what's going on, unable to see what their talking about, not knowing what's wrong, being shunted from specialist to specialist only to get no useful result.

Now even if your not a doctor you know how long its been since your last test, what the doctor told you about it and your problems, what drugs you might be taking, and so on.

Why does the medical establishment think you have nothing to contribute?

Its your body after all...

But the internet is changing all of this and soon you may have access to it all.

But that won't come without some danger and some responsibility for you.

As I wrote in "Surgical Ritual or Ritual Surgery" a while back the medical establishment is not real big on modern conveyances.   For example, check lists, a recent addition to the surgical process at VA hospitals, used to ensure that the right surgical procedure are used on the the correct patient produce remarkable results (remarkable in the sense of an 18% drop in surgical deaths).

That's right - just use a simple check list like grandma had for going to the grocery store to ensure your doing the right thing to the right patient - and 20% fewer people die (imagine how many surgeries the VA does in a year).

Now I would imagine that you wouldn't need a medical to degree to see that the test results were yours if you had access to your health records - and that alone might save your life.

Of course, all this is not really why the medical folks don't want you (and your lawyer) to have access to your records.

If you read this book you will be offered a glimpse into what really goes on on the world of medicine:

"Jauhar feels responsible when he botches the blood pressure check on a patient who later dies during an aortic dissection and when he misses the high blood sodium level of a man who then suffers irreversible brain damage."

The Information Week article misses this crucial reason why medical records are private - lawsuits.

Imagine what a skilled trial lawyer would do with the information in the book I quote above from "Intern: A Doctor's Initiation" by Sandeep Jauhar.  Jauhar goes into much more detail than this - about how deaths are handled and reviewed, about how deaths are looked at as "teaching moments" for interns.  If this book does not make your skin crawl I don't think anything will.

Right now I own a large piece of property over what's called the Marcellus Shale - an area full of natural gas deposits.  Hucksters call constantly looking to drill wells, purchase rights, run pipe lines, dig lakes, you name it - and that's with gas at around $4.00 (natural gas MMBTU's - its been as high as $15 per MMBTU).  They are all looking for that big natural gas payday.

It's kind of like the wild west.

In the case of health records the raw data itself will be like the bonanza of gas deposits for the lawyers.  I can seem them now hiring droves of interns to send out letters:

Dear Sir/Madame:


Please assign your patient lawsuit rights to Hackem, Chopem, and Suem.  We promise to get you the highest return for your lawsuit dollar and we only take 60%!

We will use our automatic healthcare trolling system to scour your records for mistakes, misdeeds, unfortunate circumstances, etc. - all at no cost to you.

Call today at 1-800-SUE-DOC


Sincerely

No doubt this will ensure medical costs stay low in the future...