People like to keep their medical problems private. This is understandable. Medical problems can be perceived as a weakness. Understandably, people like to keep things like health, work, and family separate so that a perceived weakness in one area doesn’t necessarily have to affect another area of one’s life. In reality, these pieces of peoples’ lives are integrated into a whole thing. But, to the extent that citizens of the United States like to keep medical problems isolated from their work lives and sometimes their personal lives, patient privacy will continue to be at odds with the new technology in healthcare that is being developed by leaders in the healthcare industry and in the field of technology.

Balancing patient privacy with the need for new technologies to keep apace with the growing population of aging individuals in our country is an issue that is currently on the table and actively being discussed by a number of experts in healthcare and technology. Patient privacy is considered to be an issue of paramount importance, but balanced against some of the possibilities that have been proposed and developed in technology to enhance diagnostics, communication, and enhance overall patient care, privacy, at times, seems to be a small issue. Electronic Medical Records (EMR), for example, allow physicians to look carefully at patient data from different angles using databases of information and digital technology to come up with diagnoses that might otherwise have been overlooked. But patients cringe at the idea of having their medical records stored in a digital format that could potentially be hacked.

Privacy is a valid concern in healthcare, but most people, if afflicted by a rare disorder that created extreme distress or a “fatal event” would welcome any new technology that would relieve them from their pain (or from death). New technology in healthcare has the ability to make it easier for doctors to diagnose their patients and enhance healthcare overall. It’s true that patient privacy could be at stake, but whether health and diagnosis is more important than privacy remains a question and an issue that will need to be resolved before significant progress can be made.