Monday, 11 December 2006
Employees Get Increased Access To Medical Records
5 major American companies are starting a new initiative to give their employees access to their medical records. The hope is that by making it easier for employees to view their medical history, medical errors will be reduced — and the companies will save money.
Wal-Mart, Pitney Bowes, Intel, BP America, and Applied Materials have contracted with the Omnidex Institute — a non-profit information management organization — to manage their employee’s medical records.
The system will allow the companies workers — about 2.5 million of them — to have easy access to their medical records whenever they change jobs or see a new doctor.
“Pulling together all of the pieces of my and each of our individual medical records into one view, that is the holy grail,” said Eric Brown of Forrester Research.
Some privacy experts are concerned that the system will make it too easy for companies to have access to their employees’ protected medical records.
“The initiative announced today is really a prescription for disaster. The last people that consumers trust to have access to and snoop in their medical records are their employers,” said Deborah Peel of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.
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