Hot MedFax

 Think what it would be like to be able to read your doctor's notes about you. You'd prbably love it until you got to the part where he writes you're fat. Willamette Health Partners in Oregon will soon experiment with allowing patients to get access to their doctors’ medical notes online, according to statesmanjournal.com. Called OpenNotes , Salem Health’s outpatient clinics are joining a number of other health care organizations in the Northwest that are already practicing Open Notes or intend to in the next year or two. They include Kaiser Permanente, Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Providence Medical Group Oregon, The Portland Clinic, The Vancouver Clinic and Portland VA Medical Center. Shea Corum of Salem Health tells Saerom Yoo the pilot program will help assess whether patients find the additional information helpful and whether it stimulates more productive conversations. It will also demonstrate how patients' access to these notes ...

I remember leaving a doctor I loved because I couldn't stand the hour or more wait while he was wined and dined by pharmaceutical salespeople . I'm not kidding.  This guy would take anyone who wandered in with a loaded briefcase right into his office and sit and joke and laugh with them while we patients stewed outside.  When I needed a prescription, guess what?  It was always one of the drugs these people peddled. A story today in The New York Times pointed out that all this electronic assembling of medical records is feeding right into the hands of pharmaceutical companies, giving them the lowdown on everything from the meds doctors prescribe to how often you refill your prescriptions (and if you do) to what color underwear you're wearing (just kidding, but that's probably coming, too). Databases that would have been sealed to them in the past are now open as medical records switch over to electronic health records.  And this allows drug companies to target t...

OK.  So the world knows we buy Charmin bath tissue and M&Ms and like to shop at Lord & Taylor. But how would you like it if you went to the ER for an appendicitis attack and it showed up on your chart you'd had an STD in college? According to Melinda Beck of The Wall Street Journal, with all this digitizing of our medical info, "The sharing of Americans' health information is set to explode in coming years, with millions of patients' medical records converted to electronic form and analyzed by health-care providers, insurers, regulators and researchers." Many experts agree it may be next to impossible to safeguard all that patient data, or keep it from getting into the wrong hands.  New rules may change some of this, but it's still a major threat. "The reality is, our ability to exchange electronic information is already well beyond our ability to control it," John Leipold tol Beck.  He's CEO of Valley Hope Technology in Norton, Kan...