Sophisticated Health Network Could Detect Signs of Bioterrorism. What of Privacy?
Now, the biggest challenge is getting doctors to register. Since July 1, when the system went live, the department has received 57,000 cases of reportable diseases electronically. It also gets several hundred reports a week in paper form. "Some [doctors] are very enthusiastic, and others don’t have a computer in their office and don’t want one," Benner says.
With that kind of reluctance and the ongoing challenge of getting the industry to adopt a set of standards, a national bioterrorism surveillance system seems far off, indeed. Right now, truly effective public health surveillance must await the resolution of a national debate on how homeland security will play out in a country that has always prided itself on its freedoms. And that debate will increasingly depend on how technology and CIOs can balance the public need to know with the individual’s right to privacy.
"We have to decide as a nation how much security and privacy we need when those two things are in a trading relationship," says Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Allswede. "What we’re doing in terms of information technology, and where it has to progress, is a microcosm of that larger sociological change."
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