University of Florida officials will be notifying about 1,900 patients of a UF plastic surgeon that their private health information might have been breached after the information was managed and disposed of improperly. Dr. Francis D. Ong, a UF assistant professor of plastic surgery at the UF College of Medicine-Jacksonville, stored unsecured digital photographs...
Caroline Gammell reports in the Telegraph: A computer disc containing the medical records of more than 38,000 NHS patients went missing when it was sent to a software company to be backed up – in case the records got lost. The information, which dates back 10 years, was mislaid somewhere between London and Sandown...
IBM and HIPAAT – the leading provider of consent management solutions to the healthcare industry – are joining forces to bring innovative health-information privacy controls to patients and care providers. The IBM-HIPAAT collaboration extends patient-driven privacy to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs)....
The California HealthCare Foundation released a new report last week: Just Looking: Consumer Use of the Internet to Manage Care . From the introduction to the report: A recent Pew Internet and American Life survey showed that 80 percent of consumers search the Internet for health-related information. Yet their relationship to health information on...
Much attention has greeted Google’s pilot project to provide electronic medical records online. But concerns about violations of privacy are woefully misplaced. Considering the state of medical privacy, the gain from consumer-controlled medical records simply outweighs privacy concerns. Rather than apply a federal medical privacy law to Google, state legislatures interested in protecting...
Bob Brewin of NextGov reports: In 2004, when Bush administration officials unveiled a project to provide every American with an electronic health record by 2014, they pledged to put privacy and security first. But the discovery in April of stolen health records containing sensitive medical information about U.S. patients on a computer server in...
James Niccolai of IDG News Service reports: Google launched an ambitious initiative Monday that aims to give people a central place online to store their health records and then share them with health-care providers. The public can go today to www.google.com/health and create profiles that include basic medical information such as existing medical conditions,...
Pamela Lewis Dolan reports in the May 26 issue of AMNews: Hospitals generally are well aware of what they have to do under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to ensure the security of patient data. They are also aware that their own employees might be the ones who breach that security. However,...
Epilepsy campaigners have criticised the posting of footage on the YouTube website of people having seizures. The National Society for Epilepsy (NSE) said some videos – although not all – were voyeuristic, and the modern equivalent of the Victorian freak show. The website features many clips of people having seizures, and others faking seizures...
Information and Privacy Commissioner, Frank Work, has confirmed that individuals can ask that disclosure of their health information through Alberta Netcare, Alberta’s electronic health record, be limited. On conclusion of a recent investigation, it was recommended that Alberta Health and Wellness take steps to fully implement the technology that will allow custodians to...