Kirk Nahra, a Washington lawyer who specializes in health privacy issues, said this program is a good example of the tension between providing better health care and giving up some privacy rights. “With all of these e-initiatives—e-prescribing, electronic health records—the whole purpose is to give a lot more people access to a lot more information,” he said. “In order to do that, we've got to recognize that this has an impact on privacy rights,” he noted.
“There's this idea that HIPAA and other privacy rules are giving patients the ability to control their information. For the most part, it's not true.”
