If you are concerned about having control over the privacy of your personal health information, then please contact your legislators to support proposed House Bill 5737 now before the Public Health Committee.
HB 5737 would give us the ability to decide whether want our health insurance claims data to be stored by a private company in a centralized All-Payer Claims Database – APCD (HB 5038, 2012).
This data would be all our medical diagnoses, drugs prescribed, doctors seen, with dates of visits, hospitalizations and procedures, along with our race, ethnicity and demographics that would be released to employees of the Department of Public Health and Access Health CT (the new Connecticut Health Insurance Exchange), researchers and to the public.
The state agencies may be able to see our medical claims information in an identified form, and that which is released publicly may be seen in an aggregated and/or de-identified form.
 But taking away our names, id number, and the month and day, but not the year of medical events, still leaves the data easily re-identifiable with all that would be left of our medical histories. Our employers, co-workers, or neighbors could possibly recognize us by our illnesses, broken bones and the years of our children’s births, for examples. We need HB 5737 to decide how much risk to our privacy we wish to take, as there will be the inevitable leaks and hackers. Not only would this database be the mother lode for identify theft, but for exposure of some of our most intimate information.
Susan Israel
Woodbridge