Nancy Ferris reports in Government Health IT: The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is expected to join the chorus of organizations calling for changes in federal privacy rules to increase patients’ comfort levels with e-health records. At a meeting with President Bush April 8, council members told the president that “privacy legislation…
Author: Dissent
Effectiveness of medical privacy law is questioned
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar writes in the Los Angeles Times: When Congress passed a federal medical privacy law more than a decade ago, it was hailed as a new level of protection for patients nationwide. But even though the government has received about 34,000 complaints of privacy violations since it officially began enforcing the law five years…
Figure at center of UCLA medical records flap was just 'nosy'
Charles Ornstein of the Los Angeles Times reports: The UCLA Medical Center employee who allegedly pried into the private medical records of the governor’s wife and 60 others in a burgeoning scandal was a low-ranking administrative specialist who told The Times on Tuesday that “it was just me being nosy.” “Clearly I made a mistake;…
WellPoint Customer Information Exposed
Well, PogoWasRight.org broke the story yesterday, but now the Associated Press has picked up the story and done something I couldn’t do — they got a statement from WellPoint. WellPoint’s statement to the Associated Press is not wholly consistent with what PogoWasRight.org’s investigation found, but more on that later.
(WellCare update) Insurance records of 71,000 Ga. families made public
As an update to the story reported here, Bill Hendrick of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution provides additional details: Private records of up to 71,000 Georgia families who are members of health insurance programs for the poor or working poor were accidentally made available on the Internet for several days, and some of the data may have…
California Hospital Faces Sanctions After Workers Wrongly Looked at Patient Records
Jennifer Steinhauer reports in The New York Times: The head of California’s health department said Monday that the agency planned to sanction the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center after hospital workers improperly viewed the records of more than 60 patients, including the actress Farrah Fawcett and the state’s first lady, Maria Shriver. The…