Blog 3 - Hogden

What has most intrigued me with our recent readings and discussions is this ideal of emerging technology and how this swift evolution is highly unprecedented and will continue to unfold with consequences yet to be seen. I was most compelled by the Tavani Chapter 12 reading surrounding privacy issues as it relates to bioinformatics. Tavani states that “bioinformatics is a branch of informatics, which involves the acquisition, storage, manipulation, analyses, transmission, sharing, visualization, and simulation of information on a computer” for the purpose of investigation and application (Tavani, p. 369). He focuses much of this section upon computational genomics and the deCODE Genetics Inc. scenario, which purely focuses upon “genetic/genomic information” and the idea of data mining (Tavani, p. 369). I was most intrigued by the concept of patient consent and how the deCODE scenario was able to manipulate the language of consents from the contributing individuals to allow for them utilize the information as needed.

Security and privacy have been reoccurring themes during our weekly discussions. Here with bioinformatics we are introduced to technology that will change modern medicine as we know it, and yet the infancy of this triumphant technology will likely leave many patients vulnerable to unknown forces. Consider the recent US push toward electronic medical records. The vision for this effort is pure; it desires to improve patient care by providing an interconnected medical record accessible by any participating institution at any time. An Emergency Room can instantly access a primary care physician office record to reveal the patients medications, recent EKG’s, family history and so on. While this may seem like an invaluable tool, I see endless issues with this ease of accessibility. We learned from our discussion regarding anonymous about the ease that copycats can manipulate information for the purpose of hacking or cracking institutional infrastructures for their own intrinsic desires. What if health insurance companies opted to covertly access the records of potential enrollees or their family members to determine the risk involved with insuring that individual? Or, what if the government used these systems to access nondescript information such as benign demographics and diagnoses to compile a disease database without proper consent from individuals? The former could impose great harm to an individual while the later, in a more anonymous fashion, could provide the foundation for a health care revolution. How can we truly have faith that neither will happen? While laws such as HIPAA provide a veil of security the ability to compromise any such system remains. If anonymous can shut down major credit card companies and snoop around the Pentagon’s system, then I am quite certain that someone with much less technological prowess has the capacity to penetrate a small rural hospital with their new IT equipment and electronic medical record system.

This topic is most compelling to me as I work within the health care field for a system with has an electronic medical record. The concepts we have explored over the weeks that have revealed the vulnerability of even the most seemingly fortified technological infrastructures is staggering to me. We are converging upon an era where our more sensitive and private information is going digital, yet the fate of the true integrity these electronic medical record systems remain to be seen.