Electronic Health Records: A Government Command and Control System | Twila Brase

"Health data is gold. They can slice and dice it. They can sell the products of their slicing and dicing. They can use it to create treatment protocols to control the doctors." —Twila Brase Twila Brase is a registered nurse (RN Registered nurse and PHN Public Health nurse) who co-founded and serves as president of the Citizens' Council for Health Freedom (CCHF). In 2018, Brase published the book Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth about Electronic Health Records. That is also the topic of our discussion. "Once the government has grabbed all the data, then they have the ability to control the doctors, control the hospitals and profile the patients." Government certified electronic health record systems are not simply record bookkeeping systems. The term is deeply misleading because they are way more than that. In Twila Brase's book "Big Brother in the Exam Room," she quotes Scott Silverstein, a physician who is an authority in health IT. He called EHR systems "medical meta devices." In 2018 already he said that these systems are not anything resembling electronic filing cabinets, but that they are way, way more. He called them "enterprise-wide command and control systems through which all medical transactions have to pass. Controlling clinicians and clinical resources. They are beyond just a medical device. They are really command and control systems." Brase said: "Being certified for the government means that the electronic health record has to do what the government says it has to do." Many doctors in the United States already had some version of private electronic records before the introduction of Government certified ones. And they worked quite well since such private patient record databases were designed for doctors' practical needs only and were based on doctors' requirements. They had nothing to do with government's goals and desires. But this changed completely with the introduction of government certified EHRs under Obama in [check]. Twila Base told me: "Once the government has grabbed all the data, then they have the ability to control the doctors, control the hospitals, profile the patients. One of the things we say in our organization is 'he who holds the data makes the rules.'" True. And controlling doctors and nurses is a surefire way to turn them into killers, making them into the state's instrument of eliminating part of its population. Also, governments love getting their hands on as much data as they can since their appetite to make rules and lord over their citizens is very hard to restrain and since their voracious appetite increases in proportion to the growing amount of data available through new technologies. If massive amounts of data can be used as an easy gateway to control and command citizens, then those in power will almost by default be driven to get access to as much data as they possibly can. The amount of medical data available to governments is growing exponentially: one example are the data from so-called ambient listening devices that by now have been installed in many doctors' offices. This means that an AI app is recording and transcribing everything that is being said in the exam room - whether the doctor or nurse is present or not. All this data is stored with the patient's records and can be accessed by a vast number of people, including about 1.5 million of third parties, called "business associates of covered entities." HIPAA, Brase explains, is not there to protect your privacy but to share data with about 700,000 "covered entities" and their business associates. CHAPTERS 00:06 Electronic Health Records: More Than Digital Paper Charts 01:38 How EHRs Changed the Doctor–Patient Encounter 05:49 Copy-and-Paste Records and the Problem of "Within Normal Limits" 08:45 EHRs as Command-and-Control Systems 12:11 Government-Certified Records and the 2009 Federal Mandate 16:08 Who Designed Government Electronic Health Record Systems? 17:30 Billing, Surveillance, and the Business of Health Data 22:14 HIPAA: Privacy Protection or Data-Sharing Framework? 24:18 Who Can Access Your Medical Data? 27:45 Why Signing a HIPAA Form Does Not Prevent Data Sharing 29:47 The Real Meaning of HIPAA and "Administrative Simplification" 31:19 Clearinghouses, Business Associates, and the Health-Data Economy 36:56 AI, Ambient Listening, and the New Medical Surveillance System 43:36 Clinical Decision Support and the End of Physician Autonomy 44:56 Evidence-Based Medicine, Protocols, and Algorithmic Care 48:47 The Deskilling and "Unskilling" of Doctors 53:28 Medical Ethics, AI Control, and a Patient-Centered Alternative 54:13 The 3C Solution: Cash, Catastrophic Coverage, and Charity