Is Your Privacy at Risk?
Imagine you are home on a Sunday evening surfing the web and suddenly you come across your name. Curious as to what this might be, you click on the link and shockingly discover that you are staring at your personal health information. According to an article posted by CNN.com, your private health details may be readily available for all to see on the World Wide Web.
“There’s more information out there about people than could ever possibly be realized,”
Says Dr. Steven Schwaitzberg, associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. So what does someone do if they find information from their last doctor’s checkup? That’s up to you. There are positives and negatives to both sides. Take for instance the example of a patient named Doug Smith. His doctor ordered a CT scan to investigate severe chest pains that Smith was having. Luckily, the scan came back clear. Because of Vanderbilt’s online medical records, Smith was able to view his results online himself without his doctor. And it was a good thing he did. A few pages into the results Smith noticed a cancerous lesion had been detected on the right side of his thyroid that his doctor had mistakenly looked over. Amazingly enough, because of his private records being available online, Doug Smith was able to have the problem fixed before it had gotten life threatening.
Doug Smith may have been very blessed to have his information available online, but what about others? Does making our personal health information readily available to us help, or does it hinder our right to privacy? Although mediums such as Google Health don’t sell their client’s personal information online, who’s to say that a glitch in the system won’t release private medical procedures or even financial information? Although choosing to invest in an online health website could be dangerous, for many people the risk is worth taking.
So what do you do if you find your health and insurance information online? Well you could take your cue from Doug Smith and embrace it. Because you never know, it just might save your life.
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