John Burman of the Hamilton Spectator reports: St. Joseph’s Healthcare will tell nearly a dozen patients today their private health information has been found in a garbage dumpster behind an Etobicoke coffee shop. Copies of patient records made by a resident physician at the hospital in 2001 turned up strewn around a fenced dumpster behind…
Category: Health Data
Information on thousands of UM patients stolen
John Dorschner of the Miami Herald reports: The confidential information of tens of thousands of University of Miami patients was stolen last month when thieves took a case out of a vehicle used by a private off-site storage company, UM said Thursday morning ” Anyone who has been a patient of a University of Miami…
Nurse pleads guilty to privacy violation
Carolyne Park reports in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: A Trumann woman who pleaded guilty to disclosing a patient’s health information is the first person in Arkansas to be convicted under a 5-year-old federal law designed to protect patient privacy, authorities said Wednesday. Andrea Smith, a 25-year-old licensed practical nurse, pleaded guilty to wrongfully disclosing a patient’s…
Warning on Storage of Health Records
Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times: In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of…
Tokyo hospital computer feared stolen / PC contained confidential information on 17,000 electrocardiography patients
A computer containing personal information on about 17,000 patients has disappeared from Nippon Medical School Hospital in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, sources in the hospital said Wednesday. The data concern patients who have received electrocardiography over the past decade, and include their names, conditions, test results and patient ID numbers–but did not include addresses or…
Consumer groups urge "do not track" registry
Two consumer groups asked the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to create a “do not track list” that would allow computer users to bar advertisers from collecting information about them. The Consumer Federation of America and the Consumers Union also urged the FTC to bar collection of health information and other sensitive data by companies…