EHRs are superior to paper charts in two ways.
First—because their content is digital—their contents are more easily mined, analyzed, and shared.
And second? EHRs offer the ability to communicate directly to the patient, allowing the physician (or the organization’s system) to inform the patient of an abnormal lab, a future appointment, a new service option, or a question.
And its the use of the ability to ask a question that gives you a pretty good sense if your healthcare organization’s data mining is ethical.
So what is the one question an ethical organization should ask before mining your data—anonymized or not?
Simple: Do we have your specific permission to mine your data?
A question that would be trivial to ask using the exact same EHR they are so excited to delve into. It’s the question—the one that gives you a choice of opting-in, rather than opting-out.
But do healthcare organization’s ask this, or do they just assume, conveniently, that by being becoming a patient and simply having an EHR—something, by the way, you have no choice in accepting—that you have already tacitly agreed to have your health information mined, shared and analyzed, even if it isn’t for your direct benefit?
Most of the time, they don’t ask.
And why?
Because the organization knows if they ask for permission, then most people would rather not share their data.
And that “not asking permission because they know permission will be refused”?
For an adult, that’s the strategy of a child.
But for an organization, getting ready to mine data of millions of patients?
That is a potentially serious ethical problem.