Targeted junkmail "from" your GP?

[Wendy M. Grossman]

Gerard Freriks wrote:
> Correct me when I'm wrong.
> 
> 
> The standards are there.
> The legal framework is there.
> What is missing?
> 
> Awareness with the other 'medical mob', industry and politicians?

The thing is, the European govts/companies/health authorities/etc are 
not the only places medical data is going these days. We're beginning to 
see these data-collecting devices - for example, Medtronic makes an ICD 
(a kind of fancy pacemaker) that collects data on a patient's heart and 
lungs and can hand that off wirelessly to a gizmo the patient can attach 
to a phone line to send to Medtronic, which stores it on a server in the 
US somewhere and makes it available to the doctor over a secured Web 
site. Is the legal framework in place to control what Medtronic does 
with that data once the company has it? (Genuine question; I do not 
know.) Everyone who's doing this kind of stuff says that patient privacy 
is a big concern, but I doubt very much they've understood all the 
potential problems. An MIT team managed to hack the data flow of one of 
those things (see 
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/12/technology/heart.php) and IIRC 
the company seemed inclined to dismiss it as unlikely to happen in the 
wild. That's a slight digression from our actual subject here, but it 
still suggests they may not have thought things through.

wg