Author: Dissent

Ellen Nakashima and Rick Weiss write in The Washington Post: Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), the ranking minority member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revealed yesterday that he is among the approximately 3,000 heart patients whose medical information was potentially exposed to public scrutiny when an unencrypted government laptop was stolen in February from…

Charles Ornstein reports in the Los Angeles Times: Months before UCLA Medical Center caught its staffers snooping in the medical records of pop star Britney Spears, ’70s TV icon Farrah Fawcett learned that a hospital employee had surreptitiously gone through records of her cancer treatments there, documents and interviews show. Fawcett’s lawyers said they are…

Jill Callahan Dennis of the American Health Information Management Association has a letter to the editor of the New York Times: “Safeguarding Private Medical Data” (editorial, March 26) makes an important point about the need for identifiable patient information to be better protected from security and confidentiality breaches. Not all organizations are subject to privacy…

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta has issued another opinion: Summary: The Complainant complained that Nor-Don Collection Network (Nor-Don) had disclosed his health information to his spouse contrary to the Health Information Act (HIA) during a telephone call. In the alternative, he complained that Nor-Don had disclosed his personal information to…

In the story about the new Canadian health portal, mydoctor.ca, it says: […] [Larry Mohr, president of Practice Solutions] was asked how the system could guarantee patients’ health information doesn’t end up in the public domain. “The piece that people might get most nervous about would be the secure messaging where people would normally think…

 The Canadian Press reports: The Canadian Medical Association launched a new online pilot project Tuesday it says will help patients take a more active role in their health. “It empowers patients,” said Brian Day, the president of the Canadian Medical Association. The new online “tool” was introduced by Day at a news conference and later…