“No one under the age of 30 cares about privacy.”
It was one of those comments that had everyone in the audience nodding in agreement and smiling. Bill Spooner, then CIO at Sharp Healthcare, was speaking to a room full of CIOs and other leaders at the 2013 CHIME Fall Forum about patient identifiers, and he had absolutely hit the nail on the head.
To say that privacy is a hot-button issue among CIOs is like saying the Manning family is good at football. Privacy and security are what keep hospital leaders up at night, and for good reason. According to Redspin, a total of 804 large breaches of protected health information affecting more than 29.2 million patient records have been reported since 2009.
That’s a lot of records. What’s perhaps even scarier is that these data breaches are costing the US healthcare industry an average of $7 billion annually, according to a Ponemon Institute study.
And yet, now more than ever, patients want access to their records, and they’re increasingly willing to share their data. They aren’t concerned about the dangers involved; that’s the CIO’s job. It’s the CIO who gets to worry about stolen laptops and balancing the need for security versus the growing demand for access to information. In a recent blog, John Halamka compared security to “a cold war that never ends with new threats every day requiring new countermeasures.”
Yup, Spooner knew his audience when he made that remark.
And he’s right; privacy just isn’t as important to younger people. I remember visiting my younger brother in college a few years ago. As we were getting ready to head out to dinner, I noticed that he and his roommates were all on Facebook finding out what their friends were doing later that night.
“You guys are so funny with your social media,” I remarked, realizing how old I probably sounded.
“I can’t believe you didn’t have this when you were in college,” said my brother, who is clearly of a different generation. “How did you know where the parties were going to be?”
“Yeah, how did you survive?” his friend joked.
“I got by,” I said, smiling.
But then I thought about it more and said, “I can’t imagine going through college with Facebook, and having everyone know your business. To me, that is strange.”
To young people, however, it isn’t strange at all. To Millennials like my brother, sharing information just isn’t that big of a deal. It isn’t wrong or right. It’s just something you do.
As frightening as this may be to some of us, it’s time we all accept that this is the way many people — many patients — feel. A recent survey by Makovsky Health and Kelton found that 90 percent of patients say they would be willing to share their personal health data with researchers to help them better understand an illness or improve treatment.
To me, that’s a step in the right direction. Of course, I recognize that hearing numbers like “90 percent” will make some people cringe, but this is the world we live in now. And some day, those Millennials are going to be the CIOs, and perhaps they’ll be the ones making jokes about privacy.
Share Your Thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.