A poll was released on the feelings of consumers about the privacy of their health care information. The headline on the AHIP Smartbrief (Free Subscription) warned “Poll: Many concerned about health record privacy”. A click on that headline took you to a Health Data Management website — “Survey: Medical Data Privacy a Concern”. The Health Data Management article referenced the originating Harris poll. Yet when you looked at that report you wondered whether you were reading the same story. That head read — “Many Adults are Satisfied with the Use of Their Personal Health Information.” The same poll was the subject of all three mentions.
So the media comes to a news source with their own narrative in mind, and builds the story off of that. As the saying goes, “show me the assumptions on which you base your facts.”
But shouldn’t we have a slightly higher expectations when it comes to specialized health news in what we euphemistically call the “professional press”? While you should expect some hawking of special interests or products, these articles were just too misleading to go without mention. That’s because many readers will only digest the headlines to form an opinion (or simply reinforce their bias) and quickly move on.
So I quote from the Harris poll report itself and you make the judgment which headline reflects the real content.
- Seven in 10 (70%) U.S. adults agree that they are generally satisfied with the way doctors and hospitals handle personal health information in terms of protecting its confidentiality and security. One in five (20%) strongly agree with this, 50 percent somewhat agree and another 19 percent disagree. The remaining 11 percent are not sure;
- By 63 to 25 percent, a majority agrees that increased use of computers to record and share patient medical records can be accomplished without jeopardizing proper patient privacy rights. One quarter (23%) strongly agrees with this;
- A majority (60% to 27%) feels that existing federal and state health privacy protection laws provide a reasonable level of privacy for their health information;
- A similar 63 to 27 percent of U.S. adults also agrees that they would consent to have their medical records used for medical research as long as there were guarantees that no personally-identifying information would be released.
Based on these attitudes, it would seem that about six to seven in 10 adults seem to be fairly comfortable with the use of their personal health information today. However, about one quarter of adults do have significant concerns.
