Anecdotal of course, and anecdotes are not data. My experience is exactly the opposite. I deal with quite a few specialists, unfortunately, and I’ve not had any problems in this area. ALL of the providers are told to send results of tests and procedures to my primary care doctor. When I’ve switched providers or looked for a second opinion, I have zero problem authorizing my records to be sent to another provider.
It’s good to know that this can be done. I’ve never been told that I could do so. My PCP has sent me to several specialists and has never asked if I wanted my records sent as well. Likewise, the specialists have never asked if they should send results back to my PCP.
But I certainly will do so in the future.
HIPAA 
It’s true. And it hasn’t happened that you know of. If you told your new doc that you used to doctor with the clinic in Los Elsewhere, they can just send a record request there, and get the info. Now I tell my patients I’m doing so 99% of the time (the other 1% is generally when I decide I need the records after the patient’s left my office) but there’s no requirement to do so.
Thanks. Good to know.
Fat Fingers, not my day on the keyboard.
It’s like I told my dentist last time I saw him and his was fumbling with the office computer: Dude, I’m here for your dental skills, not your typing or computer skills. I don’t expect the medical professionals to be computer experts or computer professionals to be medical experts. To each their own, right? 
(My dentist got some more of my savings account this month - I had some 40 year old fillings that were going bad and he suggested I have them replaced BEFORE I needed root canal. I concurred with the wisdom of this and submitted to the procedures. And the new ones look a damn sight better than the old silver-mercury amalgam so that was a bonus.)
EMR - though I’ve read why physicians hate it - isn’t an issue because it would be required if the records are on the cloud or held in the office.
This is a perfect example of need-to-know. If someone needs to know my records, I’m fine with them getting them. Most specialists I see are in the large practice I go to and share my records, but I’m also going to one outside and he got my records without my explicit approval. My agreeing to consult with him was implicit approval.
You are clearly more trusting of clouds than those of us who work on them are. My old employer, who makes clouds, didn’t allow any company info on other clouds.
As for releasing records to anyone working for an accredited research institution - that’s just asking for them to be leaked. Not everyone with these qualifications is ethical.
Example of need to know I heard today when I went to the Lab for a test. A guy was asking for results of tests, and the woman at the reception desk at the lab said that the Lab may do the tests but does not look at or interpret results. That’s the physician’s job. There is no need for lab people to have access to my records, and they don’t. That’s how a system should work.
Again, I keep saying this over and over again. There is nothing I can say or do or find myself diagnosed with that there won’t be thousands or millions of other people with the same thing. I am not famous. Nobody will give a shit what disease I personally end up with, or what sexual proclivities I tell a psychiatrist.
I am saying this is true for nearly all of humanity. Only a teensy, tiny fraction of us are famous enough to have a genuine, legitimate reason to need medical privacy. The rest of us will not benefit in any way from it.
With that said, it doesn’t have to be convenient or legal to use the records for those who have no reason to use them. Employers are not permitted to use false criminal records against a candidate - for example, if a record is a mistake or a court decides to expunge it, the record is not considered to exist - and while they can in practice secretly discriminate for such reasons, they cannot do so openly.
So it’s the same thing here.
TLDR: I want medical records to be as convenient to use as gmail. And I know that sometimes they will leak, in the same way that entire gmail accounts are sometimes compromised. I think the benefits exceed the cost.
If you ever have ED issues, you are free to splatter them all over the net, but don’t make everyone else do so. You don’t have to be famous to want this stuff private, you might not want your friends to know you have two years to live, for instance. People have the choice to make private things about them open, but when something gets out you can’t stuff it back in.
We all have plenty of reasons to want to have privacy. Hell, nude pictures of most of us would be soundly ignored, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the expectation that they’ll not get broadcast. And you can avoid having them available, you can’t avoid getting sick.
As for employers, when I hired people I didn’t know and didn’t care about their medical records. I didn’t see the medical records of people who worked for me who were out on disability. I think HR saw just enough to justify it, they did not share nor should they. And I knew even less about someone who might have qualified for a disability but chose not to pursue it. This was all pre-HIPAA. The expectation of medical privacy predates the law.
BTW a good research study would have anonymous records and just enough data to test the hypothesis of the study. Dumpster diving records looking for trends is not good science.
You are not correct. This in fact is how we know many of the possible negative side effects of current treatments and medications - it takes huge numbers of records. The problem is that the sets are still too small and thus erroneous conclusions are constantly being made. It’s a lot harder to make an error with a trend when n=10 million than when n = 100.
I find that the inconvenience of having to jot down a few things on an M.D. office form* is more than balanced by knowing that irrelevant details I’d prefer to keep confidential remain that way, without being accessible to insurance companies, potential employers, random computer criminals etc.
That’s wonderful. Maybe you could start a website listing your entire medical history, warts and all, and get the URL tattooed on your arm so any healthcare entity anywhere in the world could access it instantly (not to mention all your friends, acquaintances, Dopers etc.). 
*I generally answer “no” to queries on the form. I keep things on a need-to-know basis with the doc.
**As I’ve said here before, the electronic medical record is a wonderful thing for medical professionals needing information fast (and legibly). You’d be amazed though (and possibly disheartened) at the gossipy stuff that sometimes winds up on reports.
That’s not how this works and again, I didn’t say it would work that way. There is a magnitude of difference between a million people having their medical records leaked and just 1 person.
So far as I know it’s not illegal to find out about someone’s race, sex, religion, or silly things someone said when they were 15. I wouldn’t recommend doing so before an interview because it opens you up to charges of discriminatory hiring but there’s no law against it.
It is against the law for an employer to take adverse action based on the results of a background check without giving the employee the opportunity to challenge the results. (Not hiring someone is an adverse action.) By the time we’ve gotten to the point of a background check the candidate has already been hired. It’s a big waste of time and effort not to mention a pain in my ass to tell a candidate we’re not hiring because something came up in the background check. It’s much better for me to tell the candidate to call whatever third party I’m using for background checks so it can be cleared up.
Exactly. And so if there medical records were available on the dark web, and you looked them up (you’ll probably need their SSN and DOB to find the correct record which means you may have already made a hiring decision), it’s going to be real hard to justify.
Justify to whom? What leads you to think I would tell anybody that I used improperly-obtained records in my hiring decision? I just decided the other guy interviewed better, or I really liked the experience she had on product X, or the skillset somebody else had. I certainly wouldn’t mention it was your weight and your history of depression.
I think the problem with all of this is that you don’t realize you’re in the minority here. Most people aren’t okay with their information (and/or their PHI) being leaked anywhere.
You would decline, but would you have been required by law to decline?
Yes. Call up your doctor, tell them you’re going to see a different doctor and ask them to send your records over. They do it all the time. They won’t even think twice about it.
That would be between you and your doctors. A few things that come to mind would be that a specialist may not need your entire history. If an ENT needs to know that you had your appendix removed in 2001, they’ll ask. Also, if your PCP is referring you, there’s a good chance you’re being referred to someone in the same network that can already access your records, especially if they use a system like Epic.
I don’t think there’s really any level of hassle. As I mentioned upthread, I try, whenever possible, to stay in the same medical group just to make this all easier. I can tell you that my PCP, my neurologist (migraines), a GI doc I used to see and one or two others can all pull up my records without any trouble. My PCP can prescribe me a new med and my neuro can see it the next time I’m there. In fact, my PCP has even looked over my meds and suggested I get off of one that my neuro put me on because he was concerned about it causing kidney stones. Without all the records combined, he may not have picked that up.
Relaxing HIPAA, to me, doesn’t sound like a great idea. Having some sort of combined cloud system, maybe. In fact, I’ve often thought about a system just like that for prescriptions. A lot of people that don’t know the names of meds or which ones are essentially the same, may be taking far more than they realize. I can picture someone being prescribed Vicodin by their GP for knee pain, not realizing that when then their dentist gives them Percocet for a toothache, that taking two Vicodins and two percocets is going to get them far higher than they may be prepared for.
Enough people do that by accident with OTC meds* that this likely happens more often than we realize when people blindly do what docs tell them. At least if you get all your meds from the same place, the pharmacist will hopefully catch it.
*Think about how common it is for someone to take, for example, DayQuil for a cold, and Tylenol for a headache, not knowing that there’s Tylenol in the Dayquil. Or, my favorite example, Tylenol PM. I hear so many people taking that to help them fall asleep. I’ve told so many people that the PM part of Tylenol PM is just benedryl. If they just want to fall asleep, take some benedryl and leave the Tylenol out of it. A few years back, my sister woke up in the middle of the night because of some itchy rash or bug bite. She took a bunch of Bendryl for the itch and some Tylenol PM to fall back asleep. She didn’t realize (not that it’s a big deal with benadryl) that she doubled how much benedryl she thought she was taking.
TL;DR, take OTC meds based on the ingredients listed on the back, not the marketing on the front. There’s a lot of overlap.
So you’re recommending a hippa replacement?
I’m not talking about number of records. However, if you know sampling theory, accuracy does not grow linearly with number of samples. Assuming that your samples are taken in an unbiased (in the data sense) 2,000 - 3,000 is usually enough.
What I meant by dumpster diving though is that you don’t look at tons of data, see some kind of trend, and think you’ve demonstrated anything. Any data set is going to have some apparent correlations between variables about something. You use the apparent effect as a hypothesis, design an experiment with new data, and go from there.
EXACTLY. It already is this, so it doesn’t make any difference if medical records are also out there. You are already being discriminated against for tons of illegal reasons.