Category: Health Data

For privacy advocates, the name “Eric Drew” immediately evokes a few images: a man expected to die of leukemia, a sleazy lab tech stealing his details and using it for ID theft, and Drew doing battle — against the leukemia, against the ID thief, and then against credit reporting agencies who refused to clear his…

From WVEC.com: The personal information of about 30 clients of Norfolk’s Community Services Board was compromised when a case worker’s briefcase was stolen. Officials say the briefcase was left in the worker’s car in a Virginia Beach parking garage on March 24, but someone smashed a window and stole it. The case worker violated the…

Nancy Ferris reports in Government Health IT: The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is expected to join the chorus of organizations calling for changes in federal privacy rules to increase patients’ comfort levels with e-health records. At a meeting with President Bush April 8, council members told the president that “privacy legislation…

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar writes in the Los Angeles Times: When Congress passed a federal medical privacy law more than a decade ago, it was hailed as a new level of protection for patients nationwide. But even though the government has received about 34,000 complaints of privacy violations since it officially began enforcing the law five years…

Charles Ornstein of the Los Angeles Times reports: The UCLA Medical Center employee who allegedly pried into the private medical records of the governor’s wife and 60 others in a burgeoning scandal was a low-ranking administrative specialist who told The Times on Tuesday that “it was just me being nosy.” “Clearly I made a mistake;…

Well,  PogoWasRight.org broke the story yesterday, but now the Associated Press has picked up the story and done something I couldn’t do — they got a statement from WellPoint. WellPoint’s statement to the Associated Press is not wholly consistent with what PogoWasRight.org’s investigation found, but more on that later.