As a practicing physician I have long been frustrated with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system the federal government required health care practitioners to adopt by 2014 or face economic sanctions. This manifestation of central planning compelled many doctors to scrap electronic record systems already in place because the planners determined they were not used “meaningfully.” They were forced to buy a government-approved electronic health system and conform their decision-making and practice techniques to algorithms the central planners deem “meaningful.” Other professions and businesses make use of technology to enhance productivity and quality. This happens organically. Electronic programs are designed to fit around the unique needs and goals of the particular enterprise. But in this instance, it works the other way around: health care practitioners need to conform to the needs and goals of the EHR. This disrupts the thinking process, slows productivity, interrupts the patient-doctor relationship, and increases the risk of error. As Twila Brase, RN, PHN ably details in “Big Brother in the Exam Room,” things go downhill from there.
With painstaking, almost overwhelming detail that makes the reader feel the enormous complexity of the administrative state, Ms. Brase, who is president and co-founder of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF), traces the origins and motives that led to Congress passing the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009. The goal from the outset was for the health care regulatory bureaucracy to collect the private health data of the entire population and use it to create a one-size-fits-all standardization of the way medicine is practiced. This standardization is based upon population models, not individual patients. It uses the EHR design to nudge practitioners into surrendering their judgment to the algorithms and guidelines adopted by the regulators. Along the way, the meaningfully used EHR makes practitioners spend the bulk of their time entering data into forms and clicking boxes, providing the regulators with the data needed to generate further standardization.
Brase provides wide-ranging documentation of the way this “meaningful use” of the EHR has led to medical errors and the replication of false information in patients’ health records. She shows how the planners intend to morph the Electronic Health Record into a Comprehensive Health Record (CHR), through the continual addition of new data categories, delving into the details of lifestyle choices that may arguably relate indirectly to health: from sexual proclivities, to recreational behaviors, to gun ownership, to dietary choices. In effect, a meaningfully used Electronic Health Record is nothing more than a government health surveillance system. As the old saying goes, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” If the third party—especially a third party with the monopoly police power of the state—is paying for health care it may demand adherence to lifestyle choices that keep costs down.
All of this data collection and use is made possible by the Orwellian-named Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Most patients think of HIPAA as a guarantee that their health records will remain private and confidential. They think all those “HIPAA Privacy” forms they are signing at their doctor’s office is to insure confidentiality. But, as Brase points out very clearly, HIPAA gives numerous exemptions to confidentiality requirements for the purposes of collecting data and enforcing laws. As Brase puts it,
Read the rest of this post →It contains the word privacy, leaving most to believe it is what it says, rather than reading it to see what it really is. A more honest title would be “Notice of Federally Authorized Disclosures for Which Patient Consent Is Not Required.”