October 04, 2015

“What technology can do for your health”, besides very good things, might also include some very bad things

Sir, I refer to Gillian Tett’s “What technology can do for your health” October 3.

The only problem I have with the article is how she brushes over the problem of privacy: “To be sure there are issues of data privacy; and sometimes records get lost. But…”

In March 2000 I wrote an Op-Ed in Venezuela titled “Human genetics made inhuman” and in which I expressed concerns about how medical data could be used to make it more difficult for some to obtain health insurance.

That was before I really began to understand how data was so massively been put to use in so many aspects of our lives… and not always even correct data.

What would Gillian Tett say if one of her health record entrepreneurs, by means of an innocent mistake, entered a data that for instance hindered one of her children to enter a university that had decided that the expected longevity of students was good for its funding drives?

@PerKurowski