Author: Dissent

Amy Harmon reports: Is Esther Dyson, the technology venture capitalist who is training to be an astronaut, genetically predisposed to a major heart attack? Does Steven Pinker, the prominent psychologist and author, have a gene variant that raises his risk of Alzheimer’s, which his grandmother suffered from, to greater than 50 percent? Did Misha Angrist,…

Tim Eberly reports: A man who tried to become an Atlanta police officer in 2006 is suing the department, claiming it secretly had him tested for HIV and would not hire him after learning that he was HIV-positive. The man, who filed the lawsuit in federal court under the pseudonym Richard Roe, is accusing Atlanta…

Jim Hall reports: A security breach in an online computer system at Mary Washington Hospital exposed the private medical information of some of its maternity patients. A man who tried to use the Fredericksburg hospital’s online registration system for his expectant wife said the files for 803 patients were publicly available on the site. On…

Dennis Melamed writes: The Kabuki we see in the transition to electronic health records obscures two obvious and fundamental issues: The nature of the confidentiality privilege for electronic records maintained by patients instead of doctors; and The right to avoid self-incrimination when medical records contain information that might result in criminal prosecutions. Both issues deal…

Diana Manos reports: Leaders and stakeholders gathered this week to discuss medical identity theft and how the federal government could lead a campaign to prevent it. In a town hall meeting sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), experts explained how statistics are scarce…

John Morgan reports: There is a “high risk” of patient data being lost at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. A risk assessment by the hospital itself states that the high volume of data handled at the trust by a high number of staff means the risk cannot be eliminated altogether. The News has found that information lost by…