Warnings Over Privacy of U.S. Health Network

The link above is an article from The New York Times by Robert Pear that raises several important questions about privacy issues in social networks. The Bush administration has a strong interest in creating a large electronic database of private health information that would be shared by different health care providers.

“In 2004, Mr. Bush declared that every American should have a “personal electronic medical record” within 10 years — by 2014. With computerized records, he said, “we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs and improve care.””

Clearly an online medical record would be helpful in improving the country’s health care system as accurate and up-to-date medical information would be instantly available to various health care providers. It would certainly reduce costs as millions of dollars are spent every year on updating and transferring medical information. However, the biggest drawback of this plan is the security and privacy issues that are associated with creating a database of private medical records. As it was mentioned in the article, it is obvious to anyone that such a broad database could easily be misused for harmful purposes. The question then is how does one make this network publicly available to health care providers, yet make it private so that it cannot be accessed from the outside?

This question relates directly to the article that we read during the first week of class, Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan J. Watts. The authors studied an email network at a large university and reported their findings in order to analyze their results. However, they could not make all the information available in order to protect the privacy of the students and faculty. Hence, they encountered the same problem; how much information/data can one reveal without severely compromising the privacy of the clients? In this case the data was confidential, but the potential disclosure of information would not have been very harmful. On the other hand, the country’s health care network is a completely different issue. Private medical information in the wrong hands could result in a large scandal that could potentially cost billions of dollars along with the complete loss of medical privacy. A recent investigation into the issue revealed the following:

“Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, who requested the investigation, said it showed that “the Bush administration is not doing enough to protect the privacy of confidential health information.” As a result, Mr. Akaka said, “more and more companies, health care providers and carriers are moving forward with health information technology without the necessary protections.””

Such a state of affairs could have devastating consequences if health care information becomes available without privacy protection. This is just one of many problems that affects all public social networks. In an age of digital information it becomes increasingly more convenient to record valuable private records in databases that could be accessed by the proper authorities. However, making this information easily accessible also poses many security challenges that directly involve client privacy, and unfortunately there is often no easy way to solve them. Thus it becomes a question of how much privacy is one willing to surrender in return for better health care networks that could save lives.