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I'm not saying I like the Australian take on this but I do think a central database for medical records has the potential to prevent medical treatment mistakes
by pimmen 8y ago
I'm not saying I like the Australian take on this but I do think a central database for medical records has the potential to prevent medical treatment mistakes by a couple percent. That's thousands of people saved. At that point, I think it's something we really should discuss as a society because it would have a profound effect on the economy and public health. I don't think the idea is fundamentally flawed, I think that just like the justice system incentivzes people with a monopoly on violence to protect you we can legislate in a way that public health servants would be incentivized to look after your interests.
- vertex-four 8y agoSure, and I’m participating in that discussion right now - for me, it has a high risk of seriously negatively affecting me. There’s other bits of law that I oppose for similar reasons - there’s an opportunity to do a bit better/be a bit more efficient, but at the obvious cost of seriously harming people. I think that many people don’t recognise the downsides to centralised databases vs more efficient records transfer systems etc.
- pimmen 8y agoSure, if your point is that centralized government databases are inherently bad because the government could use them, I can't argue against that because you simply will not risk whatever they could do however low that risk is (if it's even quantifiable).