University of Florida officials will be notifying about 1,900 patients of a UF plastic surgeon that their private health information might have been breached after the information was managed and disposed of improperly. Dr. Francis D. Ong, a UF assistant professor of plastic surgery at the UF College of Medicine-Jacksonville, stored unsecured digital photographs of…
Category: Health Data
NHS disc containing sensitive data lost
Caroline Gammell reports in the Telegraph: A computer disc containing the medical records of more than 38,000 NHS patients went missing when it was sent to a software company to be backed up – in case the records got lost. The information, which dates back 10 years, was mislaid somewhere between London and Sandown Health…
Patients get control over health information access
IBM and HIPAAT – the leading provider of consent management solutions to the healthcare industry – are joining forces to bring innovative health-information privacy controls to patients and care providers. The IBM-HIPAAT collaboration extends patient-driven privacy to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Combined…
Just Looking: Consumer Use of the Internet to Manage Care
The California HealthCare Foundation released a new report last week: Just Looking: Consumer Use of the Internet to Manage Care [pdf]. From the introduction to the report: A recent Pew Internet and American Life survey showed that 80 percent of consumers search the Internet for health-related information. Yet their relationship to health information on the…
Experiment with online medical privacy
Much attention has greeted Google’s pilot project to provide electronic medical records online. But concerns about violations of privacy are woefully misplaced. […] Considering the state of medical privacy, the gain from consumer-controlled medical records simply outweighs privacy concerns. Rather than apply a federal medical privacy law to Google, state legislatures interested in protecting privacy…
Cyber criminals overseas steal U.S. electronic health records
Bob Brewin of NextGov reports: In 2004, when Bush administration officials unveiled a project to provide every American with an electronic health record by 2014, they pledged to put privacy and security first. But the discovery in April of stolen health records containing sensitive medical information about U.S. patients on a computer server in Malaysia…