Patients at a San Diego medical center have been warned that a hacker breached the center’s computers and gained access to patients’ personal information. The University of California, San Diego’s Moores Cancer Center sent a letter to 30,000 patients after the records were accessed late last month. Read more from the Associated Press.
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Court Upholds Illinois Abortion Notification Law
The 7th Circuit on Tuesday upheld a latent Illinois law requiring doctors to notify the parents of teenage girls seeking abortions, calling it “a permissible attempt to help a young woman make an informed choice about whether to have an abortion.” In a case spanning nearly 25 years, a group of physicians challenged the Illinois…
Preliminary Findings on VA’s Provision of Health Care Services to Women Veterans
The summary of the GAO report (pdf) released this week: ….  None of the VAMCs and CBOCs GAO visited were fully compliant with VA policy requirements related to privacy for women veterans in all clinical settings where those requirements applied. For example, many of the medical facilities GAO visited did not have adequate visual and…
Balancing privacy with better medical data
…. Some observers have decried risks to privacy associated with these plans. They have called for technological safeguards against unauthorized access and patient consent for any release of data from such files. But we ought to be worrying much more about inevitable pressures for authorized access. Creating an authoritative, fully centralized trove of all medical…
Couple dubbed racists in son's health records
A woman has reported a hospital in western Sweden to national authorities after discovering she and her husband had been described as racists in their son’s medical records. The woman filed a claim against Norra Älvsborg municipal hospital to Sweden’s Medical Responsibility Board (Hälso- och sjukvÃ¥rdens ansvarsnämnd – HSAN), a national authority that assesses medical…
Public safety, health privacy, and the ADA thrown into the mess
Tyler Lopez of TheDenverChannel.com reports: The Kristen Parker case is highlighting one of the most common intersections in health care today: the constant balance between privacy laws and public health concerns. 26-year-old Kristen Parker worked as a surgical scrub technician at two Colorado medical facilities while infected with Hepatitis C, seeking no treatment, and potentially…