Remember when American taxpayers spent over $25B(that’s billion) on digitizing medical records? If you don’t … well, we did. The last time you went to the doctor, how easy was it for you to see your aftercare instructions online, or follow up on your prescriptions, or get your lab results in the online patient portal? My guess is that it might have been easy-ish to see stuff in your doctor’s patient portal, but sharing that data from, say, your primary care MD with your ob/gyn or your rheumatologist — unless they were in the same system, in the same practice office — would have been a big NOPE. You would have done what all of us did back in the ’80s, and the ’90s, and the ’00s, and still today — you would have printed it out, or paid for a copy, and then lugged that paper with you to the other MD’s office. Where it would have been stuffed into a paper chart, and/or hand-entered into that practice’s EHR (Electronic Health Record). 20% — that’s one in five — MDs still use paper charts (as of 2016). OK, so now you’re as up to speed as you’ll need to be for the rest of my point here — American taxpayers have shelled out major moolah to digitize medical records. When it comes to those American taxpayers’ benefits from said digitization, that’s YMMV territory, that right there. Which makes the major moolah that the healthcare system is minting off of de-IDing and selling the data inside those records pretty infuriating. What, you say, you had no idea that was happening? Not surprising, because the healthcare system DOES. NOT. WANT. YOU. TO. KNOW., since if you did know, you might protest. Or even (gasp) ask to be cut in on that moolah. Have you ever heard of a company called QuintilesIMS [NYSE: Q]? If not, you’re not alone. IMS Health…
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