I'm with you, Nancy. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and I'm surprised I haven't heard the ACLU filing an injunction against NYC on this program. Since diabetes is not contagious, I don't think that because the city may end up paying the cost of care for some of its citizens gives it the right to snoop on all of its citizens. This program isn't a slippery slope in my book, it's a toboggan run.
Joseph Conn Staff writer Modern Healthcare Modern Physician Heatlh IT Strategist 312-649-5395 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Check out the NEW ModernPhysician.com, and register now for Modern Physician Stat and Modern Physician Alert >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2/16/2006 1:27 PM >>> Most if not all health departments require that contacts be notified. They just don't allow the contact to be told who had the positive HIV test without permission. I don't think anyone who has a positive HIV test is a priori a murderer. If someone in NYC hears the Health Department is collecting this data and does not want a Health Department envelope arriving in his mailbox, he has no way to stop that at the moment. He cannot contact the Health Department until they contact him by mail. If he wishes to keep the fact he has diabetes to himself, that makes it very difficult if someone else uses the same mailbox. And collecting every A1C that has been done does not even invade the privacy of just the diabetics. I am sure it is much easier just to grab all of the data than it is to write the programs to sort out all the A1Cs above 7, so they took the easy out. This represents a little more sliding down that slippery slope and the program is just getting started! On Thursday 16 February 2006 13:29, Ruben Safir wrote: On Thu, 2006-02-16 at 12:07, Nancy Anthracite wrote: > I have been working with the CDC with an eye to include in VistA the option > to report deidentified data to the Biosense project to help with the early > detection of disease such outbreaks, etc. Privacy does not have to be > violated in order to achieve most of what you are concerned about. Yeah, actually it does. In order to intervene with specific patient about their diabetes, the individual patient must be contacted. In order to prevent potential sex partners from getting AIDs and dieing, the diseased patients identity, and their current and recent sex partners need to be identified AND contacts. in the later case you have to decide if your for or against murder. Ruben ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members -- Nancy Anthracite ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
