The Trump administration announced on Wednesday a new initiative designed on Wednesday to allow Americans to share their medical records through a multitude of applications and programs managed by private technology companies – a decision of these supporters Will says easier access to these files through the country’s fragmented health care system, but that experts in digital confidentiality are afraid of making data from patients less secure.
“For decades, American health care networks have been delayed for upgrading high technology and that is what we do,” said President Donald Trump at an event announcing the initiative on Wednesday afternoon.
The administration “guarantees commitments” of more than 60 technology and health care companies – in particular Amazon, Apple, Google and Openai – “to start laying the basics of a new generation digital health ecosystem that will improve the results of patients, will reduce supplier burden and stimulate value”, according to a press release from US centers (CMS).
Making health files more easily accessible has been an objective of the federal government for decades, with the hope of allowing patients to switch transparently between providers. But such efforts have long been tempted by privacy concerns and the challenges of companies offering competing owners’ systems.
According to CMS, the new administration’s initiative will focus on “easily and transparent” sharing of information between patients and medical providers, as well as “the increase in the availability of personalized tools so that patients have the information and resources they need to make better health decisions”. The initial objectives of the initiative include applications that focus on diabetes and obesity management, the use of conversational AI assistants to help patients and the replacement of paper intake forms with digital registration options.
The announcement was the Trump’s last decision to highlight the value of the integration of the latest technologies in the health system. In June, the Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., testified in an audience of the congress on the way he sees “portable devices” as smart watches like a game changer in health care.
“We believe that portable devices are the key to the Maha agenda – making America in good health again. My vision is that each American is carrying a laptop in the four years,” said Kennedy.
The announcement caused immediately POSSER against digital confidentiality experts, who have warned of dangers to share health data with companies that are not covered by the Portability and Health Insurance Act, or HIPAA, the federal law which protects personal health information against sharing by certain entities, such as medical suppliers and insurers, without the consent of a person.
Andrew Crawford, a political lawyer at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that he cares about how data will be collected and used by companies involved in the initiative, which consumers will be informed of their confidentiality of data and the limits of the way the data can be used and shared. If the company shared the information of a patient who went beyond the requested health service – as with advertisers who could potentially target this person based on the inferences of their health data – it would be problematic, says Crawford.
Another unanswered question, he says, is under what circumstances, if necessary, the government would be able to access patient health data through this initiative and, in the affirmative, how they can use this information or not.
“We have recently seen this administration create sets of data that did not exist before and used them for things like the application of immigration,” says Crawford. He highlights reproductive health choices as an example of medical data that many would be uncomfortable to be shared between so many companies. Many applications also collect location data, notes Crawford, so he is worried about Possibility that the data collected can show, for example, if people were traveling outside the state to access abortion care which is not legal in their country of origin.
CMS said in its advertisement that the initiative will be “more secure and more personalized” and “using secure digital identity information to obtain medical records from networks aligned by CMS”.
Dr. Brian Anderson, Director General of the Coalition for Health AI, a non -profit organization focused on the creation of directives for responsible use of AI in health care, agrees that there are “outstanding questions” on the initiative, including the protections in place to guarantee that the data shared with technological companies not covered by HIPAA will remain deprived. But he thinks it is a challenge that can be taken up.
“We just need to come together, as a private and public sector, and clearly define what these road rules are to guarantee that patient data is used in a way only that they intend and want it to be used,” explains Anderson.
He says that it is “very excited” to see a group of technological companies undertake to “facilitate access to patients on their own data”, especially since “our data is often not in a centralized place”.
However, others were not sure that this initiative would produce many advantages for patients, especially if their sensitive medical records are compromised.
“I think our system is already designed to promote sharing,” says Crawford. “There are problems and there are hounds and faults in this system, but I’m not sure – because I have not yet seen the details – if and how this ad shares more information with private entities, many of which can be outside the HIPAA, will do everything to increase the quality of care.”
