Laws protecting confidentiality spring from an existing technology - paper. Robert Spena, a charter member of Computerized Patient Records Institute and the director of Clinical Information Management at the American College of Physicians, doesn't think so. The notion of proprietary information is an archaic model. Medical-record information belongs to the patient, but you have to allow the individual to share it within an agreement. We need to overcome the barriers of confidentiality and privacy so the record goes from commodity to utility.
Ownership is a thorny issue.
Patients have the right to their records, and I have the right to hold them. Another interest group pushing this debate is the American Medical Informatics Association, which takes a similar position to De Leon, emphasizing the benefits of computerizing records along with the need to create standards for managing them. If you want to have absolute security, you burn all the records. On the other side of it, patients can die because someone doesn't know what their medical state is. Lost in the debate is the voice of the patient - there is no advocacy group solely devoted to representing patients and ensuring confidentiality.