Karen Middleton reports:
When she addressed the annual conference of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in Perth last week, Health Minister Sussan Ley was already in a hostile environment.
[…]
Ley revealed that the health department had inadvertently committed a potentially serious breach of the Privacy Act by deliberately publishing supposedly anonymous Medicare and pharmaceutical claims data involving GPs and three million of their patients.
To help health researchers provide better analysis and contribute to health policy, the department had made public “de-identified” records of claims under the Medicare Benefits Schedule and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for a randomly selected sample of 10 per cent of the Australian population.
Read more on The Saturday Paper.