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Finding a healthier approach to managing medical data
Greengard S. Communications of the ACM61 (5):31-33,2018.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Aug 14 2018

Healthcare providers are confronted with formidable obstacles when it comes to providing effective medical care, even without taking into account the existing privacy laws that protect patients. Is the use of patient data when exploring new medicals treatments in line with privacy laws? Greengard echos the lack of clear legal borders between what is acceptable and what is improper when it comes to using historical health records for medical research.

The author discloses the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s (HIPAA’s) inadequacy in protecting the use of patient health records for data mining and artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare research. The author cites the penalties that organizations in Europe and Japan must pay for violating healthcare privacy laws. Do we really need consequential healthcare violation laws in all countries? With the usually accessible and anonymous behavioral and healthiness data of patients, should medical researchers be constrained in the exploration of new medical diagnostics and treatments? I personally support the legal use of private historical patient records in all medical research.

Undeniably, medical research practitioners need to more reliably present the underlying white boxes of accurate data collection, privacy, analyses, and forecasts in current and future medical systems. However, beyond HIPAA, do we need more laws that may hinder current and emerging data analytics research that relies on lively, cooperating medical systems?

Clearly, interdisciplinary medical researchers need flexible, legitimate access to private patient records for new medical research. Greengard convincingly discusses the framework required to routinely link and unify medical data without divulging the characteristics of patients. Medical professionals should be allowed to access the electronic health records (EHRs) required to complete medical tasks. Therefore, healthcare informatics professionals will find the privacy framework in this paper useful for restricting access to EHRs. Medical professionals and data mining experts should read this opinion piece and weigh in on the access issues to EHRs and the controversial data protecting privacy laws.

Reviewer:  Amos Olagunju Review #: CR146201 (1811-0604)
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