Author: Dissent

The California HealthCare Foundation released a new report last week: Just Looking: Consumer Use of the Internet to Manage Care [pdf]. 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 the…

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 privacy…

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 Malaysia…

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, allergies…

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, hospitals…

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 –…