Name: Insights: Electronic Health Records Raise Big Privacy and Security Concerns
Uploaded: 2020-07-21
Duration: 4 min 35 s
Description: Electronic Health Records have the potential to streamline care, but they also come with big risks.

[MUSIC PLAYING] MICHAL LEV-RAM: Let's talk a little bit about the security and privacy side. And I know the three of you all have opinions on this and probably somewhat different approaches. Eric, maybe we can start with you. In an ideal world, how do companies go about making sure that privacy and security are, first and foremost, top of mind when they're developing these technologies? And I know you've talked and written about how patients, consumers, should own their data. What does that world look like and is that the only solution? ERIC TOPAL: I think, ultimately, it's the only solution, that people have to own your data, because what we're seeing now is the worst case scenario, where data is sold, it's stolen, hacked. Cyberthievery is rampant. And our medical data is at least 5x the worth on the dark web as our personal financial data. So we have a situation now which is not acceptable. And if you talked to cyber gurus, they will say, you got to get it down to units of one, or the smallest possible units. Whereas, of course, it sits on massive servers that have indeed been hacked. And so many health systems have been held hostage for their data. So that requires a fundamental change. We've seen it in other countries like in Estonia and Switzerland. And other countries are adopting this ownership model, where people can share parts of their data with certain-- whether it be physicians or medical research projects or that sort of thing. Eventually we will go there because this will have to be considered a civil right. That is your data, you paid for it, and all the other things that it could change your life. But in the era of AI, it's the inputs. If you don't have all this data, which is in the US, it's all over the place, from various doctors and encounters throughout one's life, then you have a compromised input. And you can only expect so much as an output. So that's why we have to move to a different method. And we're a long ways from that today JESSICA MEGA: I think two key issues. One, is when you're dealing with health data or life science data. I'll use the example of devices. If you think about a pacemaker, or an ICD, or a continuous glucose monitor that is giving medically great information to a person who may change their dose of insulin, for example. We have to be 100% sure that this is actually their data. So again, I think understanding cybersecurity in this age is critical, and you're seeing groups across the board championing that. I think on the ownership, I would even say and take it one step further, how do you actually give value back to people? So not just surfacing a lot of medical data, but saying this is what it means for you. Here is your continuous glucose data. You ate a certain food and here's how you can make healthy choices. I think the more we think about not only the data, but value, that's an ambition that we've had from the beginning. ERIC LEFKOFSKY: One of the biggest problems you have as a patient, in terms of ownership of your data, is what do you do with the data. First of all, it's a huge amount of data. And second of all, it's largely unstructured. And what ends up happening, is you as a patient, when you get your hands on your data, you're often e-mailing it to a physician and they have no ability to import it back into their EHR or EMR system. So there is no interoperability or transferability of this data. And so I think even though the patient should own their data, and they certainly have a right to it, and even the provider should be able to house that data seamlessly, probably the bigger challenge we all have to tackle is the underlying infrastructure that allows us to move around this kind of rich clinical data seamlessly across providers, across positions, all of which is entirely today broken and siloed. But again it's likely to be fixed by these really massive technology currents that are just there. So with NLP and OCR and all these great technologies, we will likely be in a place in a very short number of years, where this data can be structured on the backend and moved between an Epic, or a Cerner, or an Allscripts, or an OncoEMR, or pick your provider. And that I think is going to be one of the biggest unlocking of patients being able to put their data from one doctor to another. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Electronic Health Records have the potential to streamline care, but they also come with big risks. 

Insights: Electronic Health Records Raise Big Privacy and Security Concerns

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Electronic Health Records could potentially streamline care.