Gienna Shaw has an article on HealthLeaders Media about healthcare entities using cloud services. She includes a number of helpful examples of how cloud services can be a boon to entities, but unfortunately, there is no real discussion of the security and privacy risks in the article. The potential problems in using cloud services are…
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Clinic blasts calls for added oversight of porn industry
Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports on the latest developments in a battle between the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) and the Adult Industry Medical (AIM) HealthCare Foundation, a Los Angeles area HIV testing clinic funded by and serving the adult film industry. The dispute pits privacy against public health concerns that unprotected sex in the adult porn industry…
Prescription for fraud: stealing professionals' identities
When we talk about ID theft in the healthcare sector, we usually think of patients’ identities being stolen. Occasionally, though, I’ve seen reports where providers’ identities were stolen to further some other scheme such as obtaining prescription medications or insurance fraud. The National Post in Canada has this story about how common this latter type…
Medco coding change exposes prescription benefit data
They probably wished it was an April’s Fool joke, but it wasn’t. On April 1, United Healthcare learned that their business associate, Medco, had suffered a computer system error that exposed members’ prescription benefit messages on the Medco web site to other members. In a letter dated May 24 to the Maryland Attorney General’s Office,…
Personal details on a toilet wall
I’ve blogged a few times about whether the dead have any privacy rights and whether their families have any rights. To those who still believe that the dead have no privacy nor need any, I would remind them to think of the pain privacy violations can cause the surviving family members. As one example,…
Nine more breaches newly revealed on HHS's web site
Thanks to Adam Shostack, I realized that although HHS provides two formats for their breach report database, the two databases do not necessarily contain the same number of breach reports on any given day. While he was analyzing data based on the .xml version containing 181 breach reports, I had been using the .csv version,…