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medpundit |
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Saturday, November 01, 2003A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients' confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients' records attached. ....She wrote: "Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed, so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet." Actual files containing dictation from UCSF doctors were attached to the e- mail. The files reportedly involved two patients. A doctor in my city runs a side business in international dictation. Rumor has it that his workers are his Indian relatives. A lot of my colleagues switched to his company a few years ago to save money. They were ecstatic with the turn-around time. Since the transcribers were half a world away, the transcriptions came back the next morning. The privacy aspect was always worrisome, though. Having patient records zipping around the Internet just didn't seem right. It's one reason my office didn't hop on the band wagon. Glad we didn't. UPDATE: A reader emails to say that one California legislator is proposing a law that will forbid any California medical records from leaving the country, and wonders how this will affect people who move overseas to work. posted by Sydney on 11/01/2003 08:01:00 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:
I am a doctor from San Fransisco, a private medical practitioner. I always have a load of reports to be transcribed, primarily the radiology reports and the patient diagnosis reports. WE used to have in-house transcription staff for this work. This was a drag on our finances. But we continued with the services, believing fully that outsourcing of transcription is an evil we can do without. |
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