When the Justice Department sought recently to seize patients' private medical records from six hospitals and six Planned Parenthood affiliates to collect information about late-term abortions, it sparked a debate about privacy and the electronic medical record.

The Justice Department dropped its efforts to obtain the records at a Chicago hospital after court rulings that releasing the records would invade patients' privacy. But how that will affect the government's quest with other hospitals is not yet know, and the debate over privacy goes on.

The records sought were paper. But what if they had been electronic? Would it have made it easier for the government to pry?

Paper or electronic, requests like those of the Justice Department "erodes public trust," says Dan Rode, vice president of policy and government relations for the American Health and Information Management Association.The Justice Department argued that a privacy violation would not take place as long as the names and personal information of the women on the medical records were blacked out.

"If we had an EMR, it would be easier to remove patient-specific information," Rode said. "It would be easier to protect the record. It's a positive in a negative situation."

Geff Brown, an IT lawyer in the Chicago office of the international law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw agrees. "EMRs will make it easier to protect patient medical information from inappropriate access while making legitimate access easier, he said.

"If your choice is to have your medical record stored in a secure environment in a computer as opposed to lying around as paper on a desk, I would choose the secure environment," he said.

The justice department request and others like it will not thwart the healthcare industry's efforts to convert to electronic records, Brown said. There may be concerns, he said, but the drive should be to enforce the law.

Rode is in favor of enforcing the law, but the idea that there are blanket requests for records puts a chill on EMR plans, he contends, even when electronic records offer better safeguards. "We need to get the public's trust," he said.

A federal appeals court on March 26 quashed the Justice Department's request to obtain the medical records from Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

The 2-1 ruling found that if Northwestern Memorial turned over the records it would invade patient privacy, upholding a ruling made by Chicago's chief U.S. district judge in February.

The Justice Department also has called for the abortion records of dozens of other hospitals, but Northwestern Memorial is the only one to claim victory in court.On March 5, San Francisco successfully fought to stop the Justice Department from seizing the medical records of 2,700 patients who had received abortions at San Francisco public health facilities throughout the past three years.

In a March 14 column in the Alameda (California) Times-Star, Kate Scannell, a physician and medical writer observed: "Interestingly, the Justice Department's recent threats to medical privacy have occurred during the same time that our federal government has been emphasizing the importance of medical record privacy in promoting national implementation and compliance with its landmark HIPAA laws.