Patient Street Address: Fill & Download for Free

The practice of medicine has been gutted like a fish in the last 15 years or more in the USA. The promise that electronic records would make portability of information possible with the push of a mouse button was at best a severe exaggeration and at worst a lie by politicians invested in the companies involved in creating those systems. The eco-friendliness of the electronic records is another falsehood. They demand generation of paper nonetheless. Most platforms are complicated and repetitive templates. I have seen the results of a downloaded and printed hospital record that occupied 11 bankers’ boxes on the floor of an attorney’s office, which would have been about 12″ of old paper charts. EMR’s are killing more trees than paper records ever did. It takes more time to complete a simple office visit note and electronically prescribe or print and sign prescriptions for a patient than in the good old days. The time wasted in this fashion takes away time from direct dealing with patients.The government and insurance carriers have added to the time wasting with their drug coverage plans with rejections, exceptions, and prior authorizations. Atop this, we have to deal with back and forth to get procedures approved, consults approved, generally involving the filling out and faxing of forms multiple times for the same thing. Then, there’s the doctor to doctor phone call to get something approved. I had some schmo turning down a stress test on a 56 year old who was getting short of breath walking 30 feet and who had normal results on his EKG, echocardiogram, chest xray, CT of the chest and upper abdomen. I was told he didn’t meet criteria. I spent 25 minutes on hold to talk to this guy and he was immediately dismissive. So, I requested from him the proper spelling of his name, the right street address, and his phone number. He asked why and I told him it was going in the patient’s record with my note about the stress test being turned down. I wanted documentation of exactly who it was who said the test was denied. That way, should he drop dead on the street from a coronary problem for which proper workup - that every 3rd year med student knows is a stress test of one sort or the other - was denied, the family’s choice of malpractice attorney would know who to pursue for the wrongful death claim. Amazingly, he then gave me the 8 digit approval number.With the insurance plans, lists of participating doctors are generally thru the company’s website so a generalist knows to whom a referral can be made which will be covered by the patient’s insurance. We learned that hard way that those lists are not kept up to date. Guess who gets chewed out when the insurance doesn’t cover the visit? Try talking to someone at the company and see how far that gets you. The usual response is that they update once a year. My office manager spent an entire workday calling 18 cardiology offices until she found one that confirmed they participated in a particular plan, but all 18 doctors were listed online as participating.Burocracy (sp) is what has wrecked the ability of the average general doctor to be efficient and reduced dramatically the time which can be spent directly with the patients. They treat the computer to make the insurers happy and Uncle Sam happy. They do nonsensical “educational” activities to pacify them - not true continuing education but needless timewasting poitically correct crap.I am not happy to be retired in that I miss interacting with my patients. I am relieved to be rid of the nonsense that has infected American medical care like an aggressive cancer.

How does DeepMind gain the data?Simple: they buy it. Virtually every tech company making a dive into the healthcare space purchases data from hospitals, doctor’s offices, insurance companies, billing companies, academic centers, etc. That’s perhaps not comforting, and the actual transaction itself is generally more complex (the value traded is not necessarily a pile of money), but actually getting access to thousands of healthcare data points isn’t very hard in this day and age.How does DeepMind ensure patient privacy?At a certain point, there’s anonymity in numbers. The moment you scrub the data of unique identifiers (name, SSN, street address, etc) from a set of thousands, it is more or less anonymous. How many 55-year-old men with high blood pressure and diabetes are there in the U.S. alone? Thousands. Bump that to 75. Still thousands. Bump that to 95. Still thousands.Outside of certain rare genetic conditions, it’s actually not very easy to pinpoint any given patient using just their medical data. I could tell you that I’m describing one woman in the Bay Area who is age 60, has high blood pressure, takes Metformin for diabetes, and previously has had a cholecystectomy and a Cesarean section for one of her pregnancies and I guarantee you’ll still find dozens of people who fit this profile. Make up almost any patient history, and even in the same zip code in any reasonably populated part of the country you’ll find multiple people who match.

"[I]n the EU, there is a single definition of personal data to encompass all information identifiable to a person. Even if the data alone cannot be linked to a specific individual, if it is reasonably possible to use the data in combination with other information to identify a person, then the data is PII."- What Is Personally Identifiable Information (PII)? Finding Common Ground in the EU and USExamples may include:Name, such as full name, maiden name, mother’s maiden name, or aliasPersonal identification number (PIN), such as your Social Security Number (SSN), passport number, driver’s license number, taxpayer identification number, patient identification number, and financial account or credit card number.Address information, such as street address or email address.Asset information, such as Internet Protocol (IP) or Media Access Control (MAC) address or other host-specific persistent static identifier that consistently links to a particular person or small, well-defined group of people.Telephone numbers, including mobile, business, and personal numbers.Personal characteristics, including photographic image (especially of face or other distinguishing characteristic), x-rays, fingerprints, or other biometric image or template data (e.g., retina scans, voice signature, facial geometry).Information identifying personally owned property, such as vehicle registration or identification number, and title numbers and related information.Information about an individual that is linked or linkable to one of the above (e.g., date of birth, place of birth, race, religion, weight, activities, or employment, medical, education, or financial information)- Personally Identifiable Information (PII)