by Sergeant Hartman » 04 Sep 2018, 8:10 am
Firstly let me say I just recently went on a rant about this. So I will go again. Apologies if you seeing it again. Secondly about 5 years ago I was involved in this to introduce it to health care workers, also having a good IT background I suppose I understood both the good points and challenges this faced. Thirdly i opted in and honestly I would definately recommend everyone to NOT opt out.
The system is operated not by the government but by one of the big 5 consulting companies, Accenture. So while the is a risk of hacking like any online information, some of the best minds in the World are charged with safeguarding the information. Be sure for them apart from possible fines the reputational damage will be huge increase of a data breach.
Data is not entered manually, it's done by the medical software, this removes the human element and likely sources of mistakes as some doctors might call the same condition different names. Furthermore the penalties of unauthorized access are very stiff, this applies at medical practices, unauthorised access by their office staff for example, or other health care professionals, thre are audit systems in place to ensure a track is maintained who accessed the info and at what times.
The info entered is a summary of your visit, furthemore the doctors can enable the contents of a particular visit not to be uploaded, eg a under age person wanting birth control but doesn't want their parents to know, who have access to the child record.
Sure government agencies could have access, but they could still do the same, the age of privacy is gone as more and more ppl spend most of their days online, companies like facebook and google, apple etc collect more data about you and readily sell it to anyone wanting to pay. Furthermore the argument of health, life etc insurance companies is also null and void, one of the forms you currently fill up gives them permission to access all your health information. From personal experience the do extensive checks and if you miss even a small visit they will find it out and interface if a claim query it, and try and weasel out of paying if it's a finding that you should have declared but didn't thing. this way ensure you have given them everything.
Now tbh as usual the govt does a s**t job to promote the benefits of things like these. Even if you are a young and fit person there are benefits of the summary information. But people with chronic diseases benefit hugely, in Australia a lot of money and time is wasted when patients present at doctors and ED as they might miss some relevant information when filing out patient history questionnaire. Or when you forget the reports or cray at home. But imagine if you present at ED unconscious, suffer from a chronic condition. You might only need one thing, but they will need to take worst case and test for everything under the sun. Or if you have a bad reaction to a particular medication and they administer that to you. I could go on, but I run out of time.
Lastly tbh the security at most GP practices is unbelievably lax, the office staff do know the passwords of most GPs or worse everyone has same passwords. Most times especially in country areas or in smaller practices, it's either the practice manager or the brother of a doctor who knows about computers but no actual IT background who is responsible for managing their servers and setting up security. Other times they will employ a local ComptersRUs company who doesn't actually understand that health information and computer systems are different than thir grandma computer or the hairdressers computer. Do a search on news stories on Google of how many practices get hacked every year and even been held to ransom by hackers is huge. What's worse is only 1 in thousand get reported by the media.