Consumer Watchdog Urges Congress to Adopt Privacy Protections in Economic Stimulus Bill

The nonpartisan Consumer Watchdog has called on Google to cease a rumored lobbying effort aimed at allowing the sale of electronic medical records in the current version of the economic stimulus legislation. Consumer Watchdog called on Congress to remove loopholes in the ban on the sale of medical records and include other privacy protections absent from the current bill such as giving patients the right to an audit detailing who had accessed their medical records and how the records were used.

Google is reportedly pushing for the provisions so it may sell patient medical information to its advertising clients on the the new Google Health database. In the letter, Consumer Watchdog wrote the following:

“Americans will benefit from an integrated system capable of making our medical records available wherever we may need them, but only if the system is properly used.

“The medical technology portion of the economic stimulus bill does not sufficiently protect patient privacy, and recent amendments have made this situation worse. Medical privacy must be strengthened before the measure’s final passage, rather than allowing corporate interests to take advantage of the larger bill’s urgency...

“First and foremost, electronic medical records should be designed to benefit patients, not the corporate interests lobbying hard on Capitol Hill to get a piece of the $20 billion in taxpayer subsidies provided for this project.”

Google responded to the allegations on its Public Policy Blog that “this claim—based on no evidence whatsoever—is 100 percent false and unfounded.

“Google does not sell health data,” it stated. “In fact, one of our most steadfast privacy principles is that we don't sell our users' personal data, whether it's stored in Google Health, Gmail, or in any of our products. And from a policy perspective, we oppose the sale of medical information in the health care industry. We are supportive of strong privacy protections for medical records. Consumers own their electronic medical data and should have the right to easily access their information and control who gets to see it. We also believe in data portability, and we support open standards that enable consumers to control their data and take it wherever they'd like.”

The five patient privacy protections that Consumer Watchdog urged Congress to adopt in the electronic medical record section of the economic stimulus bill include the following:

1. Retain and strengthen prohibition on sale of private medical data. Private medical information, including which prescription drugs we take and which illnesses we have, is extremely valuable to the medical-insurance complex. Some want to market to us, others want to use this information to deny us access to insurance coverage.

2. Provide an audit trail to track who accesses patient records. Under the current version of the bill, a patient is not able to track which medical personnel access their medical records or how that information is used. The measure must be amended to allow patients to request an “audit trail” detailing when their medical record was accessed, by whom, and for what purpose.

3. Make database holders accountable for keeping medical records private. Companies developing electronic medical record technology must be fully accountable for the safe keeping of patient information. “Safe harbor” provisions in the current legislation that would insulate these interests from accountability must be removed. For example, the current version of the bill shields database holders from telling patients when possible identity thieves access their private information as long as the data disclosure was “unintentional” and the company acted in “good faith.”

4. Allow states to adopt more protective standards. Currently, the bill allows states to establish additional privacy regulation and enforce existing requirements. These provisions must remain part of the final proposal. Other federal healthcare laws, such as HIPPA, Medicaid, and COBRA, provide a model for a federal-state partnership rather than federal preemption of more protective state standards. States have traditionally been the laboratories of innovation in patient privacy. In fact, the gold standard for medical privacy is the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, which bars the sharing, selling, or using for marketing or otherwise, any private medical information.

5. Retain House amendments protecting private information. Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) recently added amendments to the House bill requiring the holders of health information databases to make protected health information “unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable” to unauthorized individuals. This amendment will help to ensure that databases are appropriately protected to keep sensitive medical information out of the hands of identity thieves and black market information aggregators.

Source: Consumer Watchdog

(View the Daily News Archive)