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…
Category: Health Data
Unanswered questions for WellPoint and Congress (commentary)
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…
HIT: What Congress hasn't adequately addressed (opinion)
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…
California Senate Passes Bill Giving Marketers Access to Rx Information
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…
Your private health details may already be online
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…
HHS considers adding genetic information to EHRs
Nancy Ferris of Government Health IT reports: The American Health Information Community is recommending that the federal government prepare for the day when people will choose to electronically store their genetic makeup so that doctors can match medical treatments to their genes. Scientists are beginning to make connections between patients’ genetic characteristics and responses to…