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Federal ‘Biosurveillance’ Plan Seeking Direct Access to Americans’ Private Medical Records
Latest government policy to knowing and controlling everything about you. Of course your own medical history can and will be used against you by government, if need be.
Federal ‘Biosurveillance’ Plan Seeking Direct Access to Americans’ Private Medical Records
May 20, 2014 - 9:58 AM
By Barbara Hollingsworth
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/bar...eillance-plan-seeking-direct-access-americans
Latest government policy to knowing and controlling everything about you. Of course your own medical history can and will be used against you by government, if need be.
Federal ‘Biosurveillance’ Plan Seeking Direct Access to Americans’ Private Medical Records
May 20, 2014 - 9:58 AM
By Barbara Hollingsworth
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/bar...eillance-plan-seeking-direct-access-americans
CNSNews.com) – The federal government is piecing together a sweeping national “biosurveillance” system that will give bureaucrats near real-time access to Americans’ private medical information in the name of national security, according to Twila Brase, a public health nurse and co-founder of the Citizens Council for Health Freedom. The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response is currently seeking public comment on a 52-page draft of the proposed “National Health Security Strategy 2015-2018” (NHSS).
The deadline for comment is 5 pm EST on May 21[SUP]st[/SUP]. (See Draft National Health Security Strategy 2015-2018.pdf)
“Health situational awareness includes biosurveillance and other health and non-health inputs (e.g., lab/diagnostics, health service utilization, active intelligence, and supply chain information), as well as systems and processes for effective communication among responders and critical health resource monitoring and allocation,” the draft states.
But Brase warns that the NHSS proposal would allow the federal government to monitor an individual’s behavior before, during and after any government-defined health “incident” – which could be anything from a local outbreak of the flu to a terrorist anthrax attack.
“It’s very broad. It doesn’t seem to have any limits, except they say something about, you know, properly protecting the data. But from our perspective, if the government gets access to this kind of data, [and] is allowed to do research with the data…then our privacy has already been compromised. The government has already said that our data is their data for their purposes of national health security,” Brase told CNSNews.com.
“It’s very clear to us that really the government is moving toward real-time access, toward close collaboration of government and doctors for ready access to the electronic medical record and then to conduct research and analysis.”
“I don’t think they ever mentioned the word merging, but this is a very close connection they want between public health, which is the government, and clinical health, which is your doctor’s office and the hospital, for whatever diseases they choose to have reported,” she added.
Brase noted that the information collected by the government will be “all-encompassing” and include “what our health status is, whether we exercise, how often we get a cold, or what kind of medications we’re taking. They’re also looking at the climate, and the economic condition of the country, as all being a party of this National Health Security Strategy.”
“In other words, anything and everything could become a health threat by the government’s standards,” she said.
According to the draft proposal, NHSS will create “health situational awareness” by “collecting, aggregating and processing data from both traditional and nontraditional sources (such as social media) and from various governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders….Decision-makers will have the capability to visualize and manipulate data from many sources to create an operational picture suited to the specific situation and the decisions before them.”
But Brase warns that the government’s biosurveillance plan is much more intrusive than the data collection currently being done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We’re of the mind that the Fourth Amendment actually means something, so you can’t access everybody’s patient’s medical record just because you say there is a security threat or just because you say it’s good for the American public,” she told CNSNews.com.
“But the fact of the matter is that [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] HIPPA already allows the federal government and the state government and the local government and anyone who is a public health agency to have access to our medical records - identifiable medical records - without our consent. It’s in the HIPPA Privacy Rule, which has the full force and effect of law. But that wasn’t actually put in by Congress. It was put in by the Department of Health and Human Services.” (See HIPAAPrivacyRegs_EconomicStimulusChanges.pdf)
One of the dangers, Brase pointed out, is that this vast amount of medical data warehoused in a giant electronic database will only be available to government-approved researchers.
“Now, it could be the entire electronic medical record, it could be that they just have ready access to the electronic medical records because it’s on a state health information exchange, for instance, and if they are one of the partners in the state health information exchange, they can start this data draw.
“One of the things we look at is how research can be done in a way to push policies that we disagree with. They come up with findings that nobody else can validate because nobody else has access to all that data the way the government has, and nobody can ever counter it,” Brase told CNSNews.com.
According to “National Biosurveillance Science and Technology Roadmap” written last June, “effectively, appropriately, and securely sharing health event data, including parts of electronic patient records and laboratory data, has significant potential to improve national awareness of incidents that could progress to impact national security.”
The NHSS is part of what President Obama called “the first-ever National Strategy for Biosurveillance” which was announced by the White House in July 2012 as “a top national security policy.” (See National_Strategy_for_Biosurveillance_July_2012.pdf)
Twila Brase (right) with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.)
in Washington in 2012. (CCHF)
Biosurveillance is defined as “the process of active data-gathering with appropriate analysis and interpretation of biosphere data that might relate to disease activity and threats to human or animal health – whether infectious, toxic, metabolic, or otherwise, and regardless of intentional or natural origin – in order to achieve early warning of health threats, early detection of health events, and overall situational awareness of disease activity.”
“Extending electronic reporting of health information, including laboratory results, to public health serves as an example of rapidly communicating useful information….Routine, daily use of such capabilities may be leveraged to address critical requirements in the context of an emergency,” the White House document said.
continued at CNSNews: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/bar...eillance-plan-seeking-direct-access-americans
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