[Sigmed-l] Opening Medicare Data for Research - new legislation

[Leonard Davolio]

FYI - an issue that cuts across many of the specialties of SIGMED folks:

There's legislation recently introduced in the Senate that would require
Medicare to share data with private organizations for research purposes.  As
someone who works with patient data, this is an exciting prospect.  The
opportunities to detect potentially harmful trends and improve upon less
than optimal pathways of care are tremendous.  A governmental ultimatum may
also help to diffuse standards for clinical data, or least for how clinical
data intended for research is published.  But one has to wonder how all of
this will work in practice.  The greatest de-identification software is
still not capable of making anonymous all 17 types of PHI data contained in
the medical record with 100% accuracy and likely never will be.  And just
who are "private organizations" and what will the processes be for access
and handling? I hope this isn't a bill sponsored by and for big pharma but
the cynic in me can't help but wonder.  In any case, this should be an
interesting one to follow:

http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/html/news/NewsStory.cfm?articleId=15280



Leonard D'Avolio
Ph.D. Candidate
NLM Medical Informatics Fellow
Dept. of Information Studies
Dept. of Medical Informatics
University of California, Los Angeles
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/ldavolio