Randy, are medical data in fact technologically safe and secure?
Spratt: It’s as safe and secure as any information stored in any system can be. There’s a whole body of law that controls how patient information can be used and stored, and the access to that information. Obviously that information needs to be available to physicians and primary-care staff if they’re going to take advantage of it. So along with those records needs to travel the access rights that the patient grants for use of those records. Will someone ever view a medical record that perhaps they shouldn’t have? They probably will, but in an electronic world we’ll know that it happened. We’ll know who did it, which is far superior to a chart lying around on a nurse’s station for anybody to walk by and glance at. So the issue is not technology; the issue really is people getting comfortable with a new way of doing things. Hammergren: Right. If they trust their banking information in a bank, they’re eventually going to have to trust their health information outside the file folder. And
