By Healthcare Facilities Today

At the recent HIMSS Media/Healthcare IT News Privacy and Security Forum in Boston, patient privacy advocate Deborah Peel, MD, of Patient Privacy Rights, and UPMC Insurance Services Division Chief Analytics Officer Pamela Peele took the stage to debate the highly-contested issue of whether patients should have full consent over how and with whom their personal health information records are shared. 

According to an article on the Healthcare IT News website, Peele maintains that multiple stakeholders have a right to access and use patient health information because of the public investment in healthcare. Federal and state healthcare expenditures are currently pegged at nearly $3 trillion, with a recent Thomson Reuters report showing that the system wastes $700 billion a year.

That's a form of the public's investment, and "there may be other stakeholders who have property rights to these data," Peele said.

Peel disagreed, adding that failing to give patients full control over their health records is bad news from an economic perspective. 

"Forty to 50 million people a year do one of three things: avoid or delay diagnosis for critical conditions like cancer, depression and sexually transmitted diseases, or they hide information," said Peel. "There's the economic impact of having a system that people don't trust."

The article said that while the Peel vs. Peele discussion was amiable, the issue of patient privacy and consent over health data was ultimately left unsettled. 

Read the article.