Author: Dissent

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…

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…

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…

Yesterday’s Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report reported: Lawmakers, patient-privacy and health care advocates, and information technology experts on Tuesday “debated … how Congress can strike a balance between accelerating the adoption of a nationwide system of electronic medical records while protecting patient privacy,” CongressDaily reports (Noyes, CongressDaily, 6/4). The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on…

The California Senate passed a bill that would allow pharmacies to sell patient information to third-party marketers, including drug companies. It was sent to the California Assembly for consideration. The bill would allow a pharmacy to send mail to a patient without the patient’s authorization on condition that the letter pertain only to the prescribed…

Elizabeth Cohen writes for CNN: Imagine my surprise when, in the course of doing research for this story, I stumbled upon my own personal health information online. art.online.medrecords.cnn.jpg There it was in black, white, and hypertext blue. My annual mammograms; the visits to the podiatrist for the splinter in my foot; the kind of birth…