The Health IT Now Coalition is urging Congress to take action on health IT legislation this year, Modern Healthcare reports. Former Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.), co-chair of the coalition, warned that a lack of legislative action could stall the health care industry’s progress and shift the benefits of health IT away from the patient. More…
Author: Dissent
Kaiser Backs Microsoft’s Patient-Data Plan
Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times: Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit health maintenance organization, is endorsing the drive toward consumer-controlled personal health records in a partnership with Microsoft. The partnership, announced Monday, will begin with a pilot project open to Kaiser’s 156,000 employees, which will run until November. If successful, the product…
NH: Police: Nursing home worker charged purchases on dead patient's credit card
Dale Vincent of the New Hampshire Union Leader reports: A former nursing home employee is accused of charging purchases to a deceased patient’s credit card and taking $1,400 from an elderly patient’s bank account to pay her bills. Nadeige Vilgrain, 22, of 11 Barr St., Apartment 2, a former employee of Mount Carmel Nursing Home,…
Patient records stolen from NHS hospital wards
Kate Devlin reports in the Telegraph: Hundreds of computers, many containing confidential patient records, are being stolen from hospital wards every year, an investigation has shown. Records including the results of blood tests have been among the data lost. Tens of millions of pounds worth of medical equipment is also taken annually, some of it…
Woman is extradited in St. Petersburg nursing home ID theft case
Jackie Alexander of the St. Petersburg Times reports: A woman accused of using the identities of patients at a St. Petersburg nursing home to fund a $100,000 shopping spree was extradited from Michigan on Thursday. Rhonda Felicia Gills, 40, of Comanche Avenue in Tampa faces one count of organized fraud and 16 counts of criminal…
Unanswered questions for WellPoint and Congress (commentary)
On April 7, PogoWasRight.org exposed two previously unreported incidents involving WellPoint, Inc. The story was not the end of that site’s investigation, however, and subsequent statements by their spokespeople and a notification by UniCare’s lawyers to the New Hampshire Department of Justice only raised additional questions about what happened and why. On April 14, PogoWasRight.org…