The following opinion piece, which was written by Allen Gilbert, the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, appeared in the Burlington Free Press today: Allen Gilbert Vermont is about to take a huge, expensive leap into the electronic medical records field. Every Vermonter who’s ever seen a doctor or been to…
Category: Health Data
Legally eHealth: Putting eHealth in its European Legal Context
From the March 2008 report’s executive summary: […] Over the past decade, a number of articles, reports, and studies have established that the use of ICTs in healthcare does raise a number of legal questions, but few have looked, in detail, at the extent to which European legislation could provide good answers. The Legally eHealth…
Privacy concerns (editorial)
Today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal has an editorial about calls for increasing the penalties under HIPAA for snooping in files: […] In the wake of the UCLA scandal, some now want to increase punishments for violating institutions, provide penalties for individual snoopers and force providers to obtain explicit instructions from patients and their families on exactly…
Hospitals often fail to notify patients of data breaches
Jon Brodkin of Network World writes: If your medical records were exposed in a security breach, would you expect the hospital to tell you? You shouldn’t. Because of regulatory loopholes, only 56% of healthcare organizations that have exposed medical records notified the patients involved, survey results issued this month found. “There are loopholes in almost…
'SCAM' GUY HIT 50,000
Douglas Montero and Kati Cornell of the NY Post give us a more precise number and additional detail on the New York-Presbyterian Hospital breach: Dwight McPherson, a 38-year-old patient-admissions representative from Brooklyn, admitted he began to access the files and sell information in early 2006 after being approached by a man in New York working…
Another good idea with the potential for evil?
Richard Pizzi of Healthcare IT News writes: Researchers have created a set of computer programs that use electronic medical records to detect contagious illnesses and automatically report them to public health departments. The new system, called Electronic Medical Record Support for Public Health, or ESP, was described in the April 11 issue of Morbidity and…