TwitterMedical Records Held Hostage
October 22nd, 2003
I normally don’t post this kind of stuff due to my own self censorship policy on this topic. However, since I feel that what happened in “this case”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/22/MNGCO2FN8G1.DTL is very important to everyone, I thought I’d share.
We all have visited the doctor, dentist, or some medical facility at least once in our lives (I guess you COULD have never… but anyway). What happens to all that paper work you leave behind? What happens to the doctors notes, voice mail, etc.? More oft than not, this information is sent to a company contracted by the medical firm to transcribe the information into their computer system for them.
What you may not know is that sometimes this information is then sub-contracted out to another company and sometimes a third or fourth time. It can get so diluted that the original company, in this case UCSF (University of California at San Francisco), had no idea that someone in Pakistan was in control of thousands of personal medical records. And guess what? She thought it would be “cute” to threaten UCSF by posting the records on the internet if she didn’t get paid for her work from one of the sub-sub-contractors who hired her.
bq. “A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients’ confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients’ records attached.” (source: “SFGate”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/22/MNGCO2FN8G1.DTL)
Why do I care? I feel that it’s unethical to send medical records of any kind off-shore due to their nature of confidentiality. Unfortunately, there is NOTHING the United States government can do about someone in a foreign country violating our own laws. What should our government do? Make it illegal to off-shore medical records. Problem solved.
Entry Filed under: politics
