New digital health-care technologies and privacy
posted by:Chris Young // 07:42 PM // November 15, 2005 // TechLife
Last month the Ottawa Citizen featured a number of articles in its "High Tech" section that will be of interest to those attentive to developments in the area of medical technologies that have potential impact on personal privacy.
The article "Health-care system getting wired" reported on the digitization of patient health-care records, and featured Dr. Khaled El Emam (Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information), whose research focuses specifically on how to ensure the privacy of personal health records. Dr. Emam will be presenting at the Electronic Health and Privacy Conference on November 30th in Ottawa.
In "Kit monitors blood sugar over Internet" the Citizen reports on a technology being trialed by March Healthcare which will automatically log the results of blood sugar tests as they are taken every day. As the article notes, this will allow "[a]ny problem cases [to] become immediately evident and red-flagged for instant follow-up by a nursing co-ordinator".
Jason Millar has already noted on this blog the technical possibility of fully automating this process such that the blood sugar monitor is implanted in the body instead of resting on a desk, as it does in this trial.
In the last of the articles I will mention, "Health records are going electronic", the newspaper focuses on a computer database infrastructure called Oacis, which is developed and marketed by an Ottawa firm called DINMAR, and has been used in the Ottawa hospital system since 1996.
Although the article goes into great detail about the newest version of Oacis, what caught my attention was the last paragraph, which discusses how Oacis complies with the international health data storage and transmission standards specified by an organization known as HL7.
I would suggest to privacy gurus that HL7 would be very happy to receive input from professionals and academics working in non-technical fields. They have local chapters in most countries.
