There is, unfortunately, a stigma associated with being diagnosed as HIV positive in… There is, unfortunately, a stigma associated with being diagnosed as HIV positive in America, even though it has been decades since the disease was first diagnosed. Because this bias is so much greater than those associated with other diseases — after all, no one has been dismissed from their workplace after word spread that they had chronic migraines — steps have been taken to ensure that patients’ identities are protected.

Since 2002, healthcare professionals across the country used an alphanumeric code to refer to patients, assigning each person a code based on elements from his or her gender, birthday and last name. This system, used with HIV cases but not full-blown AIDS, severely decreased the risk of a security leak, but it also increased the bureaucracy that health officials had to go through.

In some instances, duplicate cases were created for the same patient. In others, errors were made in the transferring of information from office to office. Because of this, the federal government is making it difficult for states that use the alphanumeric code to continue receiving funding for HIV and AIDS care.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law Monday officially transferring California’s tracking system from code-based to name-based. This ensures that the state continues to receive the more than $50 million it annually gets to treat the disease and will hopefully save time and money by cutting down on confusion.

This is all well and good; certainly, it seems like everyone is trying to do the best they can to make sure that money for the disease is used in the best way possible. Faced with the loss of dozens of millions of dollars, it is unsurprising that California decided to do what it needed to to keep its funding. Even so, the idea of doing away with the code raises some concerns.

Is the amount of money saved worth the possible security risk for the thousands of people who are on file? Will the money that’s saved — estimated to be about $1 million annually in Los Angeles county — be rerouted into other facets of healthcare or will the federal government move it to a different department?

Could the code have been improved instead of eliminated? The country seems to be functioning fine with Social Security numbers, which proves that some codes do work. Maybe all that was really needed was a modified system. What’s more, it will be difficult to determine if the name-based system proves to be any easier or more error-proof than the codes.

State officials and experts who work in the field believe that there are enough security measures in place to protect HIV-positive people. Let’s hope they’re right.