Chronic disease patients' top online privacy worries

By a narrow majority, 51% of consumers with a chronic disease say the benefit of online access to their medical records outweighs any security and privacy risk. And while many remain worried, they are actually less worried about healthcare data than about their online shopping and banking transactions, according to an Accenture survey. The difference in attitudes is interesting but "a lot less different than you would think," says Kaveh Safavi, a physician and attorney who leads Accenture's global health business and is also a periodic contributor to InformationWeek Healthcare. This data comes from Accenture's Patient Engagement Survey, which included more than 2,000 participants in the United States.