The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario is launching an investigation in the wake of a Toronto Star story about the sale of patient medical records.U.S. health data giant IQVIA says it has the potential to access the health records of five million Ontarians. It regularly anonymizes and sells one million of them, mainly to pharmaceutical companies.On Thursday, the privacy commissioner’s office said it would launch a “review of the circumstances described” in the Star story.“The article indicates that information from patient records is being provided to private sector organizations,” the IPC wrote in a statement to the Star. “We have reason to believe that these arrangements may be contrary to the law.”Read more: Medical-record software companies are selling your health dataCompanies should get ‘meaningful consent’ for user data, privacy watchdog saysDoctors use this software during patient visits. Now Big Pharma is tapping it to sell their drugsIQVIA obtains the data from one of the companies that sells and supports electronic medical record software to physicians in the province. It’s a booming field, as doctors switch en masse from paper records to electronic patient charts.The company “anonymizes” the data — strips names and other identifying information from the health records — and then sells it to IQVIA, which describes the process but does not name the EMR company selling the data in its promotional documents.IQVIA’s main customer is the pharmaceutical industry, which uses the EMR data to track use of their drugs, identify untapped markets and plot marketing strategies.The sale of data is in a grey area of privacy law.Once patient records are anonymized, they are no longer considered personal health information and, in the view of some experts, can be sold without patient consent.However, the sale of anonymized health data raises important c ...
|
