Posters Flame ONC Comments

Someone at ONC who has to read public comments deserves a break. They’ve been flamed.

ONC just released the public comments on its 10 year Interoperability Plan. Many of the posts are from stakeholders who provided careful, point by point comments. These often represent greatly divergent views. However, these commenters have one thing quite solidly in common. They’ve read the plan.

Not so, many others who skipped the boring reading homework. They just dumped on it with one theme: The federal government has no business getting its hands on my medical records! There are dozens upon dozens of comments on this theme. They’re irate, angry and often vituperative – to say the least. The fact that nothing like that is in the plan doesn’t stop them from believing it and roundly denouncing it.

Where did all these folks get this notion? From what I can tell, two sources made the inductive leap from practioners sharing EHR records to the feds wanting to know about your lumbago.

One was the Citizens Council for Health Freedom, which issued an August 14, 2014 press release saying:

Our government is funneling billions of dollars into systems that will dump all of our private medical records into one giant hub—accessible by many,” said CCHF president and co-founder Twila Brase. Doctors and nurses who have already started using these systems are not convinced that they are ready for use or even necessary. The government is touting these procedures as ways to streamline patient care, but they’re actually an attempt to capture and store Americans’ private medical data and share it with agencies that have nothing to do with health care.

The release then urged readers to comment on the plan.

Brase cites no sources in or out of the plan for her observations or conclusions.

The other source was Tammy Bruce. On December 14, 2014 she wrote:

Your personal healthcare information will be shared with an astounding 35 agencies (at least), offices and individuals including the Department of Defense, NASA, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the Federal Communications Commission, the HHS assistant secretary for legislation, the HHS office for civil rights, the HHS office for the general counsel, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons.

Clearly, this is meant to establish the fact that every federal agency will be participating in this scheme and will have access to your health information. Not only should this be anathema to every American on principle alone, but having all of our personal information available in the cloud also poses ridiculously obvious general security threats to our personal security.

She also urged readers to comment about the plan.

Again, no proof, no cites, just assertions and conclusions.

I don’t have anything to say about their claims, other than this. Our open political discourse means that those who read posts have to carefully sort out thoughtful, even if misinformed, opinion from dross. Pushing phony claims for whatever reason just makes it all the more difficult. Whoever at ONC has to slog through the dross in these comments has my sympathy.

About the author

Carl Bergman

When Carl Bergman isn't rooting for the Washington Nationals or searching for a Steeler bar, he’s Managing Partner of EHRSelector.com.For the last dozen years, he’s concentrated on EHR consulting and writing. He spent the 80s and 90s as an itinerant project manager doing his small part for the dot com bubble. Prior to that, Bergman served a ten year stretch in the District of Columbia government as a policy and fiscal analyst, a role he recently repeated for a Council member.

   

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