Randall Parker, also known as FuturePundit, has been writing an excellent series of posts on the promise of personalized biotechnology, and how regulators are working overtime to limit its potential. Back in May, Randall briefly sketched out where this technology might lead:

Think about the general trend with information: more, direct and easier access, greater availability. Microfluidic devices that serve as labs on a chip are going to be the next big thing in medical testing. No need to have your blood sent to a lab when you can literally carry the lab in your pocket. No need to go to a drug store or a doctor’s office to get a test done.
Eventually we’ll have medical testing devices embedded in our bodies doing real time monitoring to detect problems as soon as they happen. You’ll wave a smart phone over your body to read your embedded test lab, the phone will analyze the results, and then it’ll pass the results up to a diagnostic server on the web to get run thru expert systems to do difficult diagnoses.
Regulations that keep visits to a doctor’s office in the loop block the sorts of innovative real time diagnostics that should be the future of medicine.

This is a world in which various routine tests would no longer be necessary, a step that could drive down medical expenditures while improving health outcomes. Randall offers one vision for how this might work:

The current regulatory regime is incompatible with the future of personalized biotechnology. For example, sensor technology using nanodevices will make it technologically possible for us to wear sensors and/or have sensors embedded in us. We should be able to get alerts about our biochemical status on our smart phones. “Stop eating candy since your blood sugar is going too high” or “You are now about the legal driving limit for blood alcohol” or “You are impaired in your driving ability and general thinking ability due to sleep deficiency. See details”.
I can think of countless other automated alerts driven by embedded sensor data such as warnings of micronutrient deficiencies or signs that your kidneys are not working well or early signs of a viral or bacterial infection. Imagine a sensor system that alerts you when you are incurring an aerobic exercise deficit or that lets you know that you ought to go to sleep within 2 or 3 hours.
This information should be immediately available and therefore should not first go thru review by a doctor. Yet America’s highly entrenched and very powerful regulatory apparatus stands in the way of our direct use of our own biological information in real time.

As Randall suggests, driving down medical expenditures will threaten the livelihoods of entrenched, politically powerful medical providers, who are responsible for some of the most egregious regulatory protectionism in PPACA. Freeing access to personal biological information is vitally important, and it’s a cause conservatives and libertarians should fight for vigorously. I hope to learn more, and to write more, about this subject.

Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired’s Epicenter has a short post on a related issue, prompted by a new study released by Practice Fusion, a start-up that aims to give patients real-time access to their medical records:

Plenty of doctors and hospitals already store records electronically, but they can only be retrieved by medical staff on a secure network — not by patients on their home computers, as Practice Fusion does, for free. (The company makes money by selling anonymous, aggregated data to pharmaceutical and other firms, and does not charge doctors or patients.)
As things stand now, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 requires healthcare providers to give patients access to their records within 30 days. But the company says that process currently takes up to 60 days, which can be an eternity when you’re battling an illness — and even then, state laws restrict what can be shared, patients can be charged for accessing their own information, and sometimes all they get is “just a summary” rather than the records themselves.

The excuse offered by regulators is that these protections are needed to ensure the privacy of medical records. That appears to be a canard.