The My Health Record and what you need to know
WITH high-profile doctors opting out and privacy concerns mounting, here is what you need to know about the controversial My Health Record.
National
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EVERY Australian will get a My Health Record on October 15 unless they opt out.
The record will contain information on the medicines you are taking, your medical consultations, medical test results and reveal if you have had an abortion, a mental illness, a sexually transmitted disease or a drug addiction.
The record is likely to be useful for older Australians and those with chronic and complex health conditions and people taking multiple medications.
If these people end up in hospital in an emergency doctors can access their record and see what medications they are taking and whether they have any allergies.
Tens of thousands of people have rushed to opt out of the record in the last two weeks.
If you are confused about whether you want, or need, a My Health Record, here are some things you need to know:
MEDICAL HISTORY
1. Once your My Health record is activated a list of all the Medicare funded doctor’s visits, medical tests and subsidised medicines you’ve taken for the last two years will be added to the record. The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) warns this list “may indicate diagnosed conditions or illnesses or symptoms and tests”.
This will reveal if you have had mental illness, an abortion, a drug addiction etc. If you don’t want this to happen you must take action when activating the record to prevent this happening. If your doctor activates the record, this information will automatically load.
PRIVACY MEASURES
2. If you decide to get a My Health Record you should immediately set a PIN number to control who can see it. The default setting of the record is open access, this means any health professional from you podiatrist to your dietitian (up to 650,000 health professionals) will be able to see your medical history and medication list if they are registered to use the record unless you set an access code to restrict access. There are multiple ways you can control access to information in the record you need to read about this and decide what action to take.
COURT ORDER
3. Under section 70 of the legislation police and government agencies such as the Australian Taxation Office will be able to get access to the information without a court order. Although the Australian Digital Health Agency says its policy is that it won’t release the information without a court order, this policy can be easily changed and doctors want the legislation toughened to require a court order.
RESEARCH POTENTIAL
4. The government wants to share de-identified information from your My Health Record with third parties such as researchers. Tech experts from Melbourne University showed in 2016 how easy it was to re-identify Medicare data and they say it is almost impossible to fully de-identify health data. If you don’t want your health information shared you must tick a box when you activate your My Health Record.
SECURITY
5. The government says the My Health Record is subject to military grade security and has been “defence tested”. While the Australian Digital Health Agency may have military level security tech experts warn the security of the whole system is only as good as the weakest link which, in this case, is the security at your local GP practice or hospital. A corrupt medical practitioner or health employee could hack the system by pretending to be a legitimate user. Doctors and people fraudulently pretending to be a doctor can override any PIN number and security setting you set on the record to access your details in an emergency situation and could use this as a backdoor method of gaining your information. In 2017 Medicare card details were found for sale on the dark web, this happened because someone inside the system broke the law.
TRACK VIEWS
6. The government says the information is highly secure and you can track who views your My Health Record through an audit process, there are fines of $126,000 and up to 2 years jail time for people who breach the record. But IT security experts warn there have been a series of recent high profile breaches, the medical records of Singapore’s Prime Minister and 1.5 million others were hacked recently and earlier this year News Corp revealed there is a health data breach in Australia every 2 days and no financial penalties were ever applied.
DATA THREAT
7. The government says there has never been a security breach of the record in six years. However, ADHA has reported six data breaches in that period. Four were the result of alleged fraudulent Medicare claims. The remaining two were the result of a consumer accessing a My Health Record that was not their own due to a processing error by the Department of Human Services. No financial penalties or jail terms were applied in these cases.
LONG LIFE
8. If you don’t opt out by October 15 a My Health Record will be automatically created for you and even if you later decide to cancel it, the information will be stored online until 30 years after you die, or for 130 years if the government is never informed of your death.
SLOW UPDATES
8. You will have to ask your doctor to put up a shared health summary that lists your health conditions and the treatments you have received. Many doctors are not using the record, many hospitals don’t use it and test results may not appear on it for some time. Some patients who have a My Health Record complain it has not been updated in years. The government and doctors hope if the bulk of the population has one of these records it will become more useful.
MISINFORMED
10. If you get a My Health Record it is important to check the data downloaded on to it from Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Some people have found their record says they visited doctors they don’t know and are taking medicines for diseases they don’t have. This could be dangerous if doctors rely on the record in an emergency situation.