Jeremy Olds reports: A nurse who followed the request of a mentally-unstable early childhood teacher and accessed her medical record has been exonerated after the woman complained about an invasion of privacy. The nurse, who has name suppression, was found by the Human Rights Review Tribunal not to have breached the Health Information Privacy Code…
Hospital records sold to insurance companies – in breach of the Data Protection Act?
After yesterday’s blockbuster revelation by the Telegraph, Jon Baines writes: I’ve asked the ICO to assess whether the sale of millions of health records to insurance companies so that they could “refine” their premiums was complaint with the law Read more on Information Rights and Wrongs.
An update regarding your REDcard and the data breach
Ken Hess, a Target customer, received an update letter about the Target breach which he posted in its entirety on ZDNet. There is really nothing particularly new in the letter, other than Target says they (still) have no evidence of any misuse of their branded RED cards and only a “low amount” of misuse of…
UK: Hospital records of all NHS patients sold to insurers
If this is true, then heads need to roll. And the sooner, the better. Laura Donnelly reports: The medical records of every NHS hospital patient in the country have been sold for insurance purposes, The Telegraph can reveal. The disclosure comes days after controversial plans to extract patient data from GP files were put on…
Two Defendants Sentenced In Stolen Identity Tax Refund Scheme Relating To A Health Care Provider
Wifredo A. Ferrer, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and José A. Gonzalez, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), announced that Angelo Ponds, 32, of Miami Gardens, and Sean Guillaume, 31, of Miramar, were sentenced February 21 for their participation in a stolen identity tax refund scheme relating to a…
'Hacking' may reveal personal health risks
Well, at least the editor put ‘hacking’ in quotes as this really has nothing to do with hacking and more to do with developing algorithms that may enable re-identification or identification of individuals from genetic databases when the information is combined with other publicly available databases or information. Sarah Knapton reports on the implications of…