Category: Uncategorized

JoAnne Young reports: A legislative committee clarified Friday how a performance audit of state employees’ health insurance plans will be conducted — and that the identity of employees will not be passed on to state Auditor Mike Foley’s staff. But that may not be the end of the standoff on the issue between Foley and…

Elinor Mills reports: A new Web site could help turn security breach guesswork into science. Database breaches, social engineering attacks, and hacking incidents happen at companies every day, but very few end up being reported publicly. That’s because organizations fear–and rightly so–damage to their reputation, public humiliation, and loss of customer confidence. But this silent…

Not surprisingly, a lot of the headlines  from the Ponemon study are that American hospitals spend about $6 billion/year due to data breaches, or around $1 million+ per hospital/per year. But the costs of a data breach that result in a lawsuit are considerably higher. In talking with Rick Kam, the President of ID Experts,…

The World Privacy Forum filed two sets of detailed regulatory comments on recently proposed changes to HIPAA. The first comments focused on proposed changes to HIPAA in the area of marketing patient information. The proposed changes would be harmful to patient privacy, and are contrary to the law. WPF was joined in the marketing comments by…

The provincial health minister is expected to table her Personal Health Information Act today. Maureen MacDonald first introduced the legislation on the use, disclosure and retention of health information in November 2009. Privacy issues around health information recently have been raised as the province creates electronic health information databases. As well, health foundations have asked…

Jaikumar Vijayan reports: In response to considerable privacy concerns, the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) could soon release more details on its plans to build a controversial new database containing information on the healthcare claims of millions of Americans. The agency will also likely delay its planned November 15 launch of the new database…