Category: Uncategorized

Will Dunham reports: Current government rules do too little to protect the privacy of people’s personal health information and also hinder the use of health data in medical research, a panel of experts reported on Wednesday. A committee of the Institute of Medicine, which provides advice to U.S. policymakers, urged Congress to take an entirely…

Adam Wilson reports: One of the more intensive lobbying battles last year was over “data mining” by drug companies, which use lists of prescriptions from pharmacies to find doctors who weren’t prescribing what they were selling. Then they’d pay the doctor a visit and suggest Brand X. The bill died, but its successor has broader…

Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy: Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) Tuesday urged Congress to support critical health information privacy protections included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which the Senate is considering this week. The legislation includes funding for investments and incentives in health information technology. The increased use of technology and the Internet can…

Ministers have scrapped plans that would have granted researchers access to identifiable medical records without patient consent after an uproar among GPs over patient confidentiality. A passage included in the draft NHS Constitution, which could have granted researchers unrestricted access to patient data, has been dropped from the final document. The Department of Health confirmed…

NHS bosses leading the rollout of the Summary Care Record are refusing to take no for an answer from patients who say they want to opt out, Pulse can reveal. GPs in the first wave of the rollout are being asked to send their PCT a list of patients opting out of the programme, despite…

Statement attributable to: Jeremy Lazarus, MD Board Member, AMA “Physicians have won a major victory for preserving their privacy in the recent ruling by the D.C. Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. The American Medical Association successfully fought to preserve protections against public disclosure of Medicare payments to physicians. “The court found that…