as this would be a violation of the Data Protection Act. Would this also apply to hospitals/surgeries (medical records), town & county councils etc?

Sorry about the length… I promise it is worth the read!

***********************************************
Besides paying some of the highest prices for health care, we have the dubious distinction of having the most heavily regulated healthcare system in the world. In no other country on earth are doctors and hospitals subjected to as many oversight and enforcement agencies, bureaus and commissions. Rules, regulations, and laws are duplicated, redundant, multiplied, magnified, and contradictory. Laws and regulations covering doctors and hospitals plus all the other parts of our healthcare system now account for over half of all the words, sentences, and paragraphs in our entire body of law.

If regulations could make a healthcare system work better, ours would surely be perfect. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Even those who believe that only government regulation can assure quality health care should face this fact. More laws and regulations are not going to fix our system. If we are truly concerned about the high cost of health care, if we really desire greater safety and higher quality, then we must undertake a dispassionate analysis of the current mess. If we wish to begin effective treatment of our healthcare system, we must first make an accurate diagnosis….

We have to go very far back to the first meeting of what would become the American Medical Association. This meeting was held in New York City in 1846. Twenty-nine allopathic doctors (MDs) attended the meeting. They wanted to establish a monopoly over health care in the United States for those doctors that practiced higher quality medicine, such as themselves. They felt there were too many different kinds of doctors practicing too many questionable forms of medicine. They wanted only doctors that conformed to their brand of medicine to be allowed to practice. They wished to set up their association as a medical elite and obtain a government-enforced monopoly over health care in the United States.

The following year the AMA was officially launched. Members’ efforts were at first slow to yield results. One of their first successes was in getting the exclusive right to positions in the federal government. Then, around 1870, the AMA began to find success at setting up medical boards in each state…

Soon after the medical monopoly was formed it began to push its agenda of destroying all competition. A well organized and funded nationwide purge of all non-MDs was undertaken. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century this medical monopoly managed to shut down over forty medical schools. Their idea was to keep the number of doctors low in order to keep fees up. After WW II the medical monopoly started rigidly controlling how many of each medical specialty it would allow to be trained. So ophthalmologists, orthopedists, dermatologists, obstetricians, and others began to be in short supply. And of course when supplies are low, fees are high. The medical monopoly also managed to outlaw or marginalize over seventy healthcare professions. Protection of the healthcare consumer was, as always, the rationale for this power grab.

Whether the object of destruction by the medical monopoly be homeopaths, midwives, chiropractors, or internet prescribers, the purge is conducted in the same manner. No scientific proof or research data is offered to discredit these practitioners. The entire approach is one of character assassination directed at their profession.

On one occasion the medical monopoly did try to behave "scientifically," but this approach backfired: They tried to show that obstetricians achieved a lower infant mortality rate than did midwives, but when the data was compiled it showed the reverse was true—midwives had the better record. The medical monopoly quickly abandoned this approach and returned to their proven method of buying lawmakers and writing nasty unsubstantiated accusations in their journals. It seems the public always falls for propaganda that promises greater consumer safety…

We should strongly consider abolishing state medical boards. Do we really need an additional and separate secret police for doctors? If we elect to keep the state medical board system, then governors should not be allowed to appoint doctors to medical boards or pharmacists to boards of pharmacy. This is like putting the foxes in charge of henhouse security! If these are supposed to be consumer protection agencies, then staff them with consumers. The ideal board member is the owner-operator of a small business. Such boards could consult anyone they wish for technical or professional advice.

I am sure that the Federal Trade Commission has looked at this, probably more than once. The legal problem is that the AMA does not directly intervene in the marketplace. The medical monopoly is cleverly divided up into numerous components with legal separations that make it nearly impossible to mount an effective antitrust case. Th
The AMA makes sure that it stays at arms length from the state medical boards and even has the Federation of State Medical Boards in between. The communication, cooperation, and even conspiratorial planning between the components of the medical monopoly are unquestionable, but such contact is always couched in terms of protecting the public.

If, however, the state medical board system were abolished, or disempowered, the medical monopoly would suffer a fatal blow. Cut off the small head of a giant rattlesnake and the huge body of the snake is rendered harmless. The beneficial effect of such action to healthcare consumers, American workers, and the economy would be enormous and immediate. Less appreciated would be an even more important effect: The breakup of the medical monopoly would go a long way toward taking American medicine out of its current political orientation and back into its proper scientific orientation.
http://mises.org/story/1749
I can’t even imagine how far "innovative doctors" could lower prices for their patients if they were only allowed to do so.
I am in Medical School and would love to see the changes made to the system that the article above speaks of.

This is all I found on yahoo: Computer Security Specialist

A big chunk of the ARRA money is dedicated to health-care information-technology initiatives — digitizing medical records so they’re easier to transmit and share between doctors, hospitals and pharmacists. Computer-security experts who can help keep electronic medical records locked away from computer hackers and other unauthorized users will be in high demand as the health-care sector modernizes, says Laurence Shatkin, author of "Great Jobs in the President’s Stimulus Plan."

Other specialists will be needed to train workers on how to keep the data safe. A brief certificate program may suffice to get you started in this field, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says. "There’s going to be a special role here of how to keep prying eyes away," Shatkin says.

O.K. Let me see if I got this straight. Hospitals and nursing homes “flush” unused medications down the drain because they are considered waste. Apparently then, waste water is converted to drinkable water and thus we shouldn’t have a problem with a water shortage correct? Everybody is crying about a water shortage and now there is alarm because pharmaceutical waste is turning up in the drinking water. That means we are drinking toilet and sewage water right? If it were separate, there would be no concern about contamination because drinking water would be coming from a fresher source. The way it sounds to me is that the water we drink from the tap is actually filtered and treated sewer water and now there is concern that it is not filtering out all the “MEDICATIONS” that are flushed down the drain each year.

Schools, banks, welfare agenices, hospitals, clinics, police, housing agencies, telephone companies, and security guards protecting government buildings are often forbidden to ask a person his or her legal status in the United States. These agenices are prohibited from keeping or reporting statstics on client legal status. Should they be required to keep data and publish it on the web?