Howard Anderson reports: … A personal health record is an “electronic record of identifiable health information on an individual that can be drawn from multiple sources and that is managed, shared and controlled by or primarily for the individual,” according to the FTC. Last year, the FTC issued a PHR breach notification rule, as called for under…
Category: Health Data
NC: Researcher Yankaskas appeals pay cut, demotion
More details are emerging about why the breach involving the UNC-Chapel Hill Carolina Mammography Registry led to consequences for the researcher. C. Ryan Barber reports: […] School of Medicine Office of Information Systems officials first alerted the University to the breach in July 2009 after uncovering a virus and potential security breach on the Carolina…
Ca: Veteran says privacy breaches left him suicidal
After the Tyler Clementi suicide, there’s been a lot of talk about how privacy invasions or privacy breaches might lead to desperate measures such as suicide. The veteran at the heart of a terrible privacy breach involving the Department of Veterans Affairs in Canada says that the violation of his privacy made him suicidal: A…
Doubleheader: the dangers of blogging about private matters and passing the buck, Friday edition
I was running my usual searches and the like to find items that I might want to post to my blogs, when I came across a link to an item and where the first line or so of the entry in the search engine results looked interesting. So I clicked on the link, only to…
One year later…. do the HHS breach reports offer any surprises?
It’s now been a full year since the new breach reporting requirements went into effect for HIPAA-covered entities. Although I’ve regularly updated this blog with new incidents revealed on HHS’s web site, it might be useful to look at some statistics for the first year’s worth of reports. During this period, 166 breaches each…
Should bureaucratic heads roll in the Canadian veteran's privacy breach?
More fallout from a breach I’ve been covering on this blog involving bureaucrats accessing a veteran’s psychiatric records. Laura Payton reports: Bureaucrats could lose their jobs for circulating a veteran’s confidential medical files, the veterans affairs minister said Thursday. Jean-Pierre Blackburn says he’s still deciding what to do with officials who accessed the personal files…