Category: Health Data

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.

As an update to the story reported here, Bill Hendrick of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution provides additional details: Private records of up to 71,000 Georgia families who are members of health insurance programs for the poor or working poor were accidentally made available on the Internet for several days, and some of the data may have…

Jennifer Steinhauer reports in The New York Times: The head of California’s health department said Monday that the agency planned to sanction the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center after hospital workers improperly viewed the records of more than 60 patients, including the actress Farrah Fawcett and the state’s first lady, Maria Shriver. The…

WellCare Health Plans Inc. has blamed human error for the disclosure on the Internet of some data for its Medicaid members in Georgia.The data included personal identifying information for some members of Georgia Families, WellCare said in a release. The files included information such as members’ names, birth dates, dates of eligibility, member ID numbers…

Jacob Goldstein writes in The Wall Street Journal Health Blog: Another company is jumping into the growing world of direct-to-consumer DNA testing today. For $2,500, Navigenics will tell you your genetic risk for 18 different diseases — at least according to the best available genetic studies. Another $250 a year gets you an ongoing subscription…