That led to a quick trip to an 'Urgent Care' - the frontline medical center for most Americans. At the check-in counter, the check-in nurse asked to see some ID, so I handed over my Australian driver's license. The nurse looked at the license and typed some of the info on it into a computer, then they looked up at me and asked: "Are you the same Mark Pesce who lived at...?" and then proceeded to recite an address that I resided at more than half a century ago.

Dumbstruck, I said, "Yes...? And how did you know that? I haven't lived there in nearly 50 years. I've never been in here before - I've barely ever been in this town before. Where did that come from?"

"Oh," they replied. "We share our patient data records with Massachusetts General Hospital. It's probably from them?"

I remembered having a bit of minor surgery as an 11 year old, conducted at that facility. 51 years ago. That's the only time I'd ever been a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Somehow that had never been forgotten.

We seem perfectly willing to accept that everything we do today leaves a permanent record. It appears that long before Eric Schmidt declared, "Privacy is dead," any of our pretensions to privacy had already joined the Choir Invisible. //

I don’t much care how my records made it into 2025. I am interested in why nobody ever decided to delete them.

I realize we all want our medical records instantly available to inform treatment in moments of great need. But half a century of somewhat senseless recordkeeping strains credulity. Most likely my record remained in that database simply because it's never been cleaned out - an operation that would take time and budget that would never be approved because, why would you ever delete patient data?

This has the feel of a situation we had no idea we were making for ourselves - countless sensible decisions culminating in a ridiculous outcome. Go forward another fifty years, when it's quite likely I, too, will have joined the Choir Invisible. Will my patient record still be in that database? What purpose would that serve? If my records as a child are in there, half a century later, it's easy to imagine this database holds records of many other people who have passed on and therefore shouldn't be in there at all. Privacy lost to laziness. //

Alex 72
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Medical records should be kept but access should be controlled
I agree yes you want medical records kept, patient history is always useful and provided they are only shared with the patient or a doctor or other professional they have consented to be cared for by, and who is not engaged in malpractice, it's not harmful. The hard part is drawing the line on how much anonymised data can be used for research, ensuring that data remains anonymous and managing consent for sharing data when patients are treated elsewhere or researchers want to use data from multiple sources.

and if you keep them for someone's entire lifespan then you should provided they did not object in their lifetime and next of kin explicitly consent or at least don't object probably archive it for future research in the near/medium term and historical value in the long term. Again managing consent, allowing reasonable anonymised research in the public interest, preventing de-anonymisation and deciding the limits of how long parts of it stay private vs when genealogists and historians can have unrestricted access.. is the challenge.

To do any of this effective durable storage, access control, authentication and authorisation are just some of the challenges. I have seen data analytics firms who's job is just this struggle to get everything correct so a group of organisation just trying to provide healthcare, research, treatments, disease, prevention.... Having to do this as an add on with a limited budget I am honestly impressed its only now with ransomware we are starting to see issues and paper records were not being stolen and abused on a massive scale in the past...

I don't know the answer but I don't think its the delete key

Gene CashSilver badge
Why would you ever delete patient data?
Yes, seriously.

I can understand other records, but not medical ones.

I was able to get proper medical care, including surgery, for a broken coccyx after proving I had fallen off a hay bale in 1973 and seriously injured myself, and thus it was a chronic thing and not just the minor recent incident my doctor insisted it was. I would have otherwise not been considered eligible for the surgery.

And after you're dead, it's no longer a privacy issue and becomes historical records. It's no different than census records.

Should this data be held indefinitely? Yes.

This is the same sort of data that let me piece together that my great^9 grandfather was Edward Reavis, born 1680 in Paddington, England, and left to come to Virginia, after being held in Newgate prison for his religious beliefs. He moved to Henrico county, Virginia in 1721 and died in Northampton county, North Carolina in 1751. I've also found 454 other relatives down to me, through a ton of things including bible notes, estate papers, census records, marriage records, medical records, military records, family papers, private letters, obituaries, social security records, tombstones, and even old wedding invitations.