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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

A patient sees two doctors for different conditions.

The doctors prescribe different medications.

The patient goes to two different pharmacists to pick them up.

In a victory for privacy, the patient dies from a fatal interaction of the prescribed medications.

In the US there is a strong medical privacy law. And it includes an exception for providers of medical care to share treatment information with each other, for precisely this reason. Even so, every single time you see a doctor in the US, you are handed a notice saying they'll share information for permitted purposes (the triad of "TPO" -- Treatment, Payment, and Operations), and given a form to sign saying you have been made aware of this.

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In the UK, the doctor and pharmacist will ask you if you are on existing medication. I know this because a pharmacist refused to sell me Ibuprofen when I told him that was on Ramapril for high blood pressure.

And you can deliberately or accidentally leave something out, yes, or go to other lengths to hide information.

The point was to be an illustrative example of why it can be useful for health-care providers to share information. HN, predictably, took it as a challenge to try to work around and find as many possible ways to hide the information as they could.

Your current system is still broken if say I go to a second doctor and pay with cash, no insurance involved, so it still preferable the doctor and pharmacist to ask you if you have known allergies, other treatment or suffer for some specific illnesses .

You could extend your argument that insurance companies should get access to what food and drinks you buy so they prevent side effects(and not at all tax you more because you drink beer or eat cheap food a lot)

It's clearly the patient's fault here. Every adult knows that in general, drugs cannot be mixed as easily as candy.

Also if you're seeing multiple doctors (like, for example, a general practitioner and a specialist) you should be transparent on what prescriptions you're already taking.

Your doctor is not a third party to your medical information; perhaps you could exclude them from accessing it, but then you'd be the one forcing them to do something dangerous.

Being an idiot and getting yourself killed is not the doctors fault.

Part of the ACA was the consolidation of electronic medical records such that situations like this won't happen.

EU resident here. I am reasonably sure that your doctor has access to your medical records when you hand them your smartcard, regardless of which doctor(s) previously updated said records.

As far as I know, the answer is no. There was an article in "Die Datenschleuder" #98 [1] about it.

[1] https://ds.ccc.de/download.html (german)

At least in Germany they don't. You have to take your medical records in paper form from your old to your new doctor.

I think it's non-ideal, but the health insurance should never need to know whether you're using your CPAP. They should only know if the doctor prescribed it.

Information should be shared with the pharmacy and other doctors. That would be helpful and would save lives.

EU resident here. We're not like distinct states in the USA, we're independent countries and each country has it's own systems. Healthcare systems vary dramatically between them.

In one country, I visit any doctor and they have my full medical history, despite not living there.

In another country, every time I visit the same doctor, they somehow don't have any files for me and I have to sign up as a new patient, despite being born and resident there.

It's all shambles, but in both cases, I get healthcare for free so it could be a lot worse.

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