Liz Austin Peterson reports in the Houston Chronicle: The Harris County Hospital District and the Texas Attorney General’s Office have agreed to settle a lawsuit over the privacy of medical records for a Houston jail inmate who died while hog-tied in a padded cell, a hospital district spokesman said this week. The hospital district sued…
Author: Dissent
RI: Hospital reports security breach
A security breach was reported at Roger Williams Medical Center. Hospital officials said Dr. Satori Iwamoto, a skin cancer specialist, had a digital camera stolen from an outpatient area. The pictures of at least three cancer patients in various stages of treatment were on the camera. Each picture had the patient’s name on it. A…
Alert: Pharmacies Are Still Profiting At Your Expense Your Help Is Requested
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has sent me a copy of this release/alert: The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) has been in the forefront in asserting that pharmacies — and their marketing partners, the big pharmaceutical companies — act improperly when using the medical information in customer prescriptions to sell more drugs. Albertsons, a supermarket powerhouse operates…
Hospitals Struggle With Access Control
Sharon Linsenbach writes in eWeek: Despite increased awareness of access control issues, healthcare providers continue to struggle with security and compliance related to user access, according to the results of a survey conducted at the Health Information Management and Systems Society 2008 conference in February. The survey, conducted by enterprise provisioning and access control software…
TX: Agency discovers private patient information on Internet
Melissa McEver reports in the Brownsville Herald: All it took was a quick Internet search to yield private medical information on more than two dozen Rio Grande Valley children. Until Thursday, the Web site of a children’s rehabilitation clinic had a link to spreadsheets containing the full names, phone numbers and insurance status of about…
Privacy and Public Health at Risk: Public Health Confidentiality in the Digital Age
By Myers, Julie Frieden, Thomas R; Bherwani, Kamal M; Henning, Kelly J: Public health agencies increasingly use electronic means to acquire, use, maintain, and store personal health information. Electronic data formats can improve performance of core public health functions, but potentially threaten privacy because they can be easily duplicated and transmitted to unauthorized people. Although…