Practice Fusion, the service dubbed the Google Apps for Doctors, has announced a new tool for physicians to more readily identify Tier 1 candidates for H1N1 vaccination. What this does is provides immediate markers for a physician to determine which of their patients is at risk for contracting H1N1 and would benefit from a vaccination.
The new Practice Fusion tool comes in the form of a global system report, presenting any participating physician-users with access to the necessary information regarding their patients. What prompted the addition to the Practice Fusion service was a California doctor who requested an option within the Practice Fusion service to filter patients based on their possible need for an H1N1 vaccination. Practice Fusion looked into the feature request, and realized its benefits for all its physician-users within the system.
A swift roll-out of the report was considered necessary, based on the seasonal and current climate regarding susceptibility to the H1N1 virus. The report itself has been stated by Practice Fusion as going along with the regulations outlined by CDC Pandemic Guidelines, ensuring the safety of private patient data. The swine flu has created quite a scare in the past few months, and is considered a public health concern.
The question remains, however; should doctors have this type of information in such an institutionalized format? As a web-based tool, Practice Fusion presents ready access to patient information amongst other physician tools, making the management of a doctor’s office and its patients more streamlined tasks. The rewards of this streamlining are expected to continuously trickle down to patients, presenting them with more organized office staff and a doctor’s ability to better address their health concerns.
Yet as a web-based tool, privacy becomes a central issue for Practice Fusion. The threat of having one’s account hacked into is something nearly every company has to worry about in this day and age. When it comes to private health information, however,the stakes are raised, and higher standards of privacy protection are expected from companies such as Practice Fusion.
Another concern with such a report being made available to physician users is the potential for bias to occur surrounding a particular group of patients–in this case, those with the highest need for the H1N1 vaccine. At this point, Practice Fusion appears to be offering a useful tool for filtering out patients that have an immediate risk for contracting swine flu. Yet any further use of such data, especially outside of the Practice Fusion web service, could drum up concern for privacy advocates. This is particularly poignant because of the recent investment Salesforce made in Practice Fusion, highlighting the cloud-computing aspects of the company.
My primary concern with such systematic implementation surrounding health information is the delineation of patients into sub-groups, should that information be used in a negative way. I recognize the necessity of gathering information from a wide pool of individuals in order to gain on research that improves our overall health as well as the health system. I just hope that the integrity of such programs and services such as Practice Fusion remains intact as every aspect of our lives become more integrated with web-based tools.