Electronic health records: is Alaska onboard? Presidential mandate requires national health information network by 2014.

• Author: Sergeant, Deborah Jeanne

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If a natural disaster destroyed the hospital or doctor's office that stores your medical records, what would you do? Suppose you experienced a serious health incident and lay unconscious far from home and your vital health information?

Years ago, unless you retained copies of your health records and kept them in a secure place, you'd be out of luck. But as electronic records become more and more common, patients need not fear that their records will be destroyed or inaccessible when needed the most.

Electronically stored medical records became so prevalent that in 2004, President Bush gave an executive order to the Department of Health and Human Services to create a national health information network (NHIN) within 10 years, which would be 2014. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology was created to oversee the immense project.

Many people don't seem to be aware of the initiative to form a NHIN. Health Industry Insights, a subsidiary of the Framingham, Mass.-based research and analysis company IDC, reported in 2006 that a whopping 70 percent of survey respondents did not know of the government effort to have health care providers digitize their records.

In the same survey, 86 percent felt either somewhat or very concerned about their records' privacy.

"Privacy concerns are a barrier to moving forward, primarily being able to have the comfort level that can be assured," said Ted Israelson, information technology services manager for the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services in Juneau.

TRANSFERRING RECORDS

But privacy concerns about health care records aren't a new issue. In 1996, Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to meet the need of a national protocol for electronically transferring health records. State-by-state laws weren't sufficient to protect patients because records often cross state lines, and some states' standards were lower or inconsistent with others.

Now, every state must meet minimum HIPAA requirements and currently some exceed them.

Eventually, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services penned laws dictating privacy, which became the HIPAA Privacy Rule, effective April 14, 2003. (Smaller entities were granted a year's extension to achieve compliance.)

The HIPAA Privacy Rule defines protected health information to include an individual's past, present or future physical or mental health conditions or any kind of...