A Brief Note on Medical Records Privacy

If anyone actually wanted to achieve medical privacy in electronic medical communications, they could use encrypted email and Signal; there would be no third parties to disclose the information.

I don’t know why so many people and medical offices so willing to trust third party information brokers like Oracle and Epic with their communications and medical records. These companies’ business model is gathering information about patients; there’s a huge conflict of interest in relying on them to transmit private information. Two major medical data firms, Oracle Health, formerly Cerner, and Epic, the provider of MyChart, have both been sued over privacy violations. MyChart requires all future privacy disputes to be handled by private arbitration, making it difficult to gain a reasonable settlement should medical privacy be breached.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"AI" and Productivity

[I keep bringing these up on Bluesky, so I think it’s time to gather them up and make a post out of them.] This is a collection of articles on the problems of “AI.” “AI”—really, various sorts of generative machine learning models—including generative large language models (gLLMs) and generative stable diffusion models (gSDMs) so far do not live up to the promises of their marketers. A computer you can talk to is one of the great dreams of computing, and the initial releases of transformer-model based chatbots seemed to live up to this. There have been long-standing qualms about this idea, most notably Dijkstra’s argument that the imprecision of natural language was an impediment to correct thinking about computation and to accurate computing. 1 Unfortunately, so far it appears that Dijkstra was correct; gLLMs and gSDMs are notorious for errors and they are not currently designed to indicate uncertainty to their users so that people confidently rely on their erroneous output. There ar...
Read more

Nuclear Fusion, "AI," and Big Science

Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, is a major investor in a firm called Helion (unlocked Bloomberg article), which claims it will be producing electricity from nuclear fusion by 2028. This is the second version of this article; physicist Stefan Urbat wrote to inform me that after 60 years there has been progress in dealing with second-order instabilities.
Read more

The General Intelligence of Robots

“Artificial intelligence” researchers mean by the phrase “general intelligence” two things. One is simply a machine learning system that can, like humans, use its knowledge for many different tasks. This is not something that has currently been built; language models produce language, stable diffusion models produce images, and neither seem to have any concepts of the underlying realities these words and images reflect. The second is the “general intelligence,” g , derived from intelligence tests, which is believed by some to be a unifying reality behind intelligence test scores. In a paper on GPT-4 from Microsoft a Wall Street Journal Editorial by Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream Science on Intelligence is cited as providing a definition of general intelligence. It’s an appalling piece, repeating debunked claims about racial differences in intelligence and claiming as scientific consensus hypotheses that are at best debatable and at worst outright false.
Read more