Privacy's Guarded Prognosis

…a woman promoting
pharmaceuticals showed up in his office two years
ago armed with juice and bagels for the office staff
and a printout from a computer database for him.

"After the preliminary niceties, she asked me if I
wanted to see a list of my perimenopausal patients
who were not on estrogen replacement therapy," Dr.
Sheehan recalled…

It is still not common for doctors to keep patient
medical records in electronic databases. All told,
only about 5 percent of all doctors' offices do so.
But most hospitals keep laboratory results and
insurance and prescription information in computer
databases, as do pharmacies and insurance firms.
And as data is exchanged, it can be used in
unforeseen ways. The woman who visited Dr.
Sheehan worked for a company running a
pharmaceutical benefit program, so it could have
collected the data about Dr. Sheehan's patients from
claim forms.

Marketing is not the only way patient information
may be put to unexpected uses. Medical information
could also be used to deny insurance coverage, or
even employment, to someone. Another concern is
identity theft because Social Security numbers and
birth dates are commonly used to identify patients.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/01/technology/01MEDI.html?pagewanted=all