Erin McCann writes: Since 2005, some 60 million Americans have had their private health information compromised or disclosed electronically – a fact that has privacy experts, political players and consumers alike demanding reform. In an epoch of health IT, is the government doing enough to address and quell the privacy worries of the American people?…
Category: Uncategorized
Docs lack access to psychiatric records
Bernie Monegain reports: Medical centers that elect to keep psychiatric files private and separate from the rest of a person’s medical record may be doing their patients a disservice, a Johns Hopkins study concludes. In a survey of psychiatry departments at 18 of the top American hospitals as ranked by U.S. News & World Report’s…
Articles on patient privacy and data sharing
The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association is devoted to patient privacy and data sharing. Some of the articles are freely available in full text. You can find the table of contents here. h/t, Daniel Barth-Jones
Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data
The story of how Massachusett Governor William Weld’s de-identified medical records were quickly re-identified in 1997 by then-graduate student Latanya Sweeney is now legendary in discussions of the risks of sharing “anonymized” or “de-identified” health records that might foster research. In an article on Scientific American, Erica Klarreich describes a mathematical technique called “differential privacy” that could give researchers…
Happy New Year!
I wish a Healthy and Happy New Year to all those who have read or contributed to DataBreaches.net in 2012. Each day, I never knew what my e-mail or tweet stream would bring, but readers provided thoughtful comments, tips, and great suggestions. Now let’s just hope that 2013 brings us better data security by those…
Your Mobile Device and Health Information Privacy and Security
In light of a recent blog post about nurses using their own smartphones to enter clinical data, I thought this might be a good time to point readers to HHS’s recent resources for securing mobile devices. Their top tips: 1. Use a password or other user authentication 2. Install and enable encryption 3. Install and activate remote wiping…