When a coalition of technology companies, insurers and health care providers launched a $100 million project last month to provide free electronic prescribing software to every physician in the United States, it was greeted with cheers. The presence of brand name vendors was supposed to ensure that sensitive prescription records would be private and secure.

But those who believe there is anything private about e-prescribing under the National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) " or any other e-prescription system " are simply incorrect.

Security makes little difference because every identifiable prescription in the country is data mined and sold daily. Nobody needs to break into pharmacies to steal our prescriptions; they are for sale. For example, market intelligence firm IMS Health reported revenues of $1.75 billion in 2005 solely from the sale of prescription records, primarily to drug companies.

Privacy is the right to control who sees your sensitive health records and the right to decide if those records are even entered into electronic systems. But it is impossible for anyone to have a private prescription " meaning that it is never disclosed without a patient's consent " because data mining has eliminated that right.

Furthermore, many people refuse to take psychiatric medication or other medications in an attempt to prevent the pharmacy benefits management industry from reporting to employers that they are on antidepressants or other medications.

Knowing that prescriptions are not private also keeps people with other sensitive illnesses from taking medications. And that exerts pressure on doctors to avoid prescribing pain medications " out of concern that the Drug Enforcement Administration is tracking their prescribing patterns. The lack of prescription privacy is a problem that endangers people's lives and quality of life.

That brings us to more misinformation about e-prescribing: that it is a panacea for preventing prescription errors. Pharmacies have been converting handwritten prescriptions into electronic prescriptions for more than a decade, so software that catches errors and drug interactions could have been used before with electronic prescription data. Doctors don't need to issue e-prescriptions to reap the benefits of software that checks for correct doses and a drug's conflicts with other medications.

In the rush to extol the benefits of e-prescribing, NEPSI also neglects to mention that e-prescribing will introduce new sources of error. It could produce about the same rate of errors as written prescriptions.

With written prescriptions, two licensed professionals " the physician and the pharmacist " look at the prescription. Two experienced humans are paying attention. If there are any questions, the pharmacist calls the doctor. With e-prescribing, only one human will look at the e-prescription, the doctor. Indeed, e-prescribing may make errors more common than when doctors write prescriptions.

Most people do not know that they cannot keep prescription records private " it's a huge area of ignorance. Now that we are moving rapidly into an e-health system, we need to build it right. Congress should follow the lead of New Hampshire, which passed a law in 2006 to stop illegal and unethical prescription data mining.

We need all the benefits that health information technology can bring, but we also need privacy. Technology can provide both " we should never have to choose between our privacy and our health.

Peel is a physician and chairwoman of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation based in Austin, Texas.