The Coalition for Patient Privacy and 25 of its member organizations are asking Congress not to pass an e-prescribing mandate unless it includes provisions for protecting the privacy of prescription information.
In a letter to lawmakers, the coalition said the sale of prescription information for data-mining purposes has been a reality for more than a decade. “Mandating e-prescribing without privacy provisions endorses and encourages the current practices,” the letter states. “It sets Americans up for even greater violations of their private health records in the future.”
The letter requests that 11 protections be included in any e-prescribing legislation, including a provision that would allow doctors to continue writing paper prescriptions without penalty. Another would “require that any prescription data transmitted via e-prescribing be used only for the express purpose of prescription filling and submitting the necessary codes to the insurer for payment.”
Other proposed provisions would require annual reports to patients listing everyone who accessed their data, notifications of security breaches and strong technical protections for data.
Among the organizations co-signing the letter are the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the National Association of Social Workers and the Gun Owners of America.
A bill sponsored by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) would require doctors to use e-prescribing for Medicare patients or take a 10 percent cut in certain fees they would normally receive. The bill, known as the Medicare Electronic Medication and Safety Protection (E-Meds) Act, is pending in the Senate Finance Committee.
There have been reports that Kerry’s bill would be included in the committee’s forthcoming legislation to adjust doctors’ Medicare reimbursements. The American Medical Association has dropped most of its opposition to the E-Meds bill.
The data mining cited by the Coalition for Patient Privacy occurs when information about doctors’ prescribing habits is stripped of details that would identify patients and sold to pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers and others interested in patterns of prescription drug sales and usage.
Dr. Deborah Peel, who leads the coalition, said an e-prescribing bill would be an excellent opportunity to put a stop to that practice. She said enough information remains in the records to allow the patients’ identities to be ascertained.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
