Judge Rules Against the DEA in Prescription Drug Privacy Lawsuit
From the article:
The suit, originally brought by Oregon’s prescription database program manager and four individuals, including a medical doctor, was later joined by the ACLU, which helped present, and win, the case against the DEA. In a tidy, succinct and well-reasoned decision, U.S. District Court Judge Ancer Haggerty saw the implications for violation of the plaintiff’s rights to privacy under the Fourth Amendment and ruled accordingly.
And what do we think is going to happen when Obamacare and EHR start collecting all our health data in a single massive data base.. that is being overseen and managed by Uncle Sam ?
Filed under: General Problems
In The State of New York they are confiscating legally acquired property on the basis of what medication someone takes.
The future is very bleak with so much access to private information that is going to our there. Just look at what problems that have occurred already and this is just the very beginning. I agree that we are trouble and the future of our lives is very scary. New technologies will be the end of us at some point. JMO
steve,
I’ve disagreed with you about certain things about Obamacare but I definitely agree that the electronic health records is a major problem. I’m not sure how privacy will be protected when untrained nurses and medical assistants just release information that really should have been confined to the original doctor’s office as opposed to anyone who uses say epicare or other EHR systems. Or when the dea goes around the long way trying to get information through doctors’ offices who are less likely to challenge the dea at the door.
I’ve already seen it happening where we call to get information and they can find things that were done in the ER or in other offices that are ostensibly not even linked to the doctor’s office in question. Yes it’s convenient for the pharmacist who needs extra information but what if that patient went to a private office wanting to get for example viagra and didn’t want every other doctor’s office knowing that he had gotten that or some other variation of this.
All it takes is one prescription for Xanax after a death in the family, for example, and you are marked with an anxiety disorder forever and you should be treated as not believable as a patient. It’s a bias that can’t really be reversed if it’s in every single record of every office you go to.
What if you got really bad care through one system and you want to divorce yourself from that system and yet the next system you enter has access to all of that information and you don’t feel that that’s not trustworthy information you’d rather start over new at least to some extent? Who’s going to go to the trouble of writing to the institution asking them to correct all of their records etcetera etcetera?
Great article you linked to! This is a win for patients and privacy.