Your medical data, in bits & bytes.(Have You Heard?)

Hindsight is 20/20, and foresight can be, too. The latest example: the promise and peril of electronically storing all the data in your private medical records.

The federal government is working right now to convert bulging drawers of paper medical records into computer files, then linking those files to a central system (see our report on page 39). Once this information network is established, your blood pressure and cholesterol levels, your bone and brain scans, will be accessible electronically, just as your banking and other financial records are now. That's precisely why consumer groups and patients must have a say in the development of the network and the standards that govern it. If we don't, we'll be scrambling to stop the same abuses and fix the same problems that we face in protecting our financial information.

There's widespread agreement on the need to accelerate the use of information technology in our otherwise high-tech health-care system. Most hospitals and doctors' offices still store patient records on paper, making the history of our medical care hard to transfer from one hospital or doctor to another. The inefficiencies of this system lead to medical errors and the loss or misplacement of vital information. As for the patients, we rarely see our own fragmented records or track our own health histories.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services has launched a program to speed up the adoption of electronic health records and to form a network linking them nationwide. The Senate passed legislation in November that includes a ...