Health Law

Snooping, selling records

Posted on August 19, 2008
More medical record snooping issues: This time from Iowa. Part of the problem is healthcare employees snooping in medical records. This is understandable and should be expected. It's not acceptable, and those who do it should be severely punished...

Self-care tools

Posted on August 19, 2008
Self-Care Tools: Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on technological devices that help patients (and their physicians, if they so wish) control and manage their care. This is just the type of thing to drive technology into the healthcare delivery system: get techno benefits to patients that are easy to see, and the system will incorporate the technology...

Providence CSO speaks

Posted on August 18, 2008
Providence CSO Speaks: Eric Cowperthwaite, chief security officer at Providence Health and Services, gave an interview with CSOOnline discussing Providence's problems with HIPAA. He's understandably cautious, but it's nice that he's willing to talk about it...

health social networking issues

Posted on August 18, 2008
Facebook for your Health: I don't know if you saw this over the weekend, but the Washington Post ran a story on Saturday about a personal healthcare social networking program set up by WellNet, a health management company. I'm not clear on how WellNet is set up; it doesn't look like an HMO, but rather an information management company that helps employers understand and manage employee health

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More Providence post-mortem

Posted on August 15, 2008
More on Providence: AIS has a pretty good wrap-up of the Providence "resolution agreement," including some interesting "follow the money" answers.

Medicare EHR Pilot Program

Posted on August 12, 2008
EHRs for Medicare Patients: Medicare is going to start up a pilot program in Arizona and Utah to provide electronic health record options to Medicare patients. Old folks + technology = funny results sometimes, but it's certainly true that the elderly, as the biggest consumers of healthcare, stand to gain the most from the efficiencies and safety that EHRs can bring...

Michigan Governor

Posted on August 08, 2008
Michigan Governor's PHI Hacked: It's not only the UCLA Medical Center (or NY Presby for Clinton) that has a problem. It seems Sparrow Hospital in Michigan also has a problem with employees peeking into the medical records of the rich and famous (or at least powerful).

HHCC provides EMRs

Posted on August 06, 2008
Electronic Medical Records: Hartford Healthcare Corporation, parent of Hartford Hospital and Midstate Medical Center in Connecticut, is taking advantage of the Stark exception to subsidize the purchase and installation of an Allscripts electronic medical record system with several big physician groups affiliated with the hospital system.

UCLA celeb med record snoopers

Posted on August 05, 2008
UCLA: It turns out there were a whole lot more prying eyes at UCLA Medical Center than originally thought.

EHR praise for Dossia

Posted on August 01, 2008
Dossia gets props: In EHR news, a federal panel pushing for healthcare IT has given high praise to Google, Microsoft, and others participating in the Dossia patient-controlled electronic health records initiative.

Georgia BC/BS data breach

Posted on July 29, 2008
Data Breach in Georgia: Apparently, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia didn't test out a change in their computer system, and somehow addresses on EOBs got mismatched. The result was about 200,000 Explanation Of Benefit letters were sent to the wrong addresses...

Congress pushes EMRs: Sorry for

Posted on July 25, 2008
Congress pushes EMRs: Sorry for the lack of postings, but I've been vacationing in the face of a hurricane. Anyway, I saw this in some email headline clippings this morning: The House has moved forward the acronymally abominous "Protecting Records, Optimizing Treatment, and Easing Communications through Healthcare Technology Act", to be known as the "PRO(TECH)T Act...

Providence Settlement

Posted on July 18, 2008
Providence Settlement: Way back in 2006, I reported (and kept you all well updated) on an attempted laptop theft involving medical records on home health patients at Providence Health System in Oregon. An employee took home disks with patient records on them for "safekeeping," but locked them up, in one of those laptop travel cases, in his car in the driveway...

Medical ID theft survey

Posted on July 16, 2008
Medical Identity Theft: There's been plenty of news on medical identity theft, and it seems that the general public is getting the idea that this could be a big problem. As I've said along, it's not the medical information in the PHI that's worth stealing, it's the financial info.

P2P filesharing data breach

Posted on July 09, 2008
Latest Data Breach, with an interesting twist: Peer-to-peer or filesharing arrangements allow people to share music, movies, and other items downloaded to their computers. But they can also be used to by a hacker to sniff around in other parts of the participant's computer, which is exactly what lead to the latest data breach to hit the news...

Why docs don't use EHRs

Posted on July 07, 2008
Why doctors don't use EHRs: Why are doctors hesitant to use EHRs? On the whole, doctors generally embrace technology. Certainly medical technology, like imaging modalities. And they seem to be generally ahead of the curve with techno toys like iPhones and the like...

security breaches

Posted on July 03, 2008
Security Breaches: having a tough perimeter is great, but you must watch for inside (or near-inside) jobs. According to this story, most breaches come from your business associates, not from outside hackers.

EHRs

Posted on June 26, 2008
This looks promising: The trouble with electronic medical records is getting people within the healthcare business, particularly providers, to use them. There are a couple of legitimate fears -- the "betamax" fear, where a provider doesn't want to invest in the "wrong" EMR; the "culture" fear, which is just inertia in dealing with paper records, and the "privacy" fear, which derives from the

Medical ID Theft

Posted on June 25, 2008
Medical Identity Theft: great article from the Wall Street Journal. Hat tip: Kirk Nahra.

Booz Allen Hamilton contract

Posted on June 13, 2008
Healthcare Identity Theft: the Office of the National Coordinator for healthcare IT has contracted with consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton to find ways to fight medical ID theft. The goal is to find ways to detect and prevent people from stealing the medical identity of others so as to get insurance when they don't have it.

Hacker punished

Posted on June 13, 2008
An Object Lesson in Managing Employee Termination: A federal jury in San Diego has sentenced a computer engineer to 5 years in jail, and ordered him to pay $400,000 in restitution, for hacking into his ex-employer's computer system and deleting records...

PHRs

Posted on June 12, 2008
Latest Personal Health Record News: USA Today reports on the plethora of companies offering electronic personal health records, either to their employees or to the public (and duly notes the medical record privacy concerns). Microsoft's HealthVault has gotten a lot of press lately, but just between you and me, I find HealthVault hard to use...

Medical ID theft

Posted on June 02, 2008
Medical ID Theft: Interesting article in this morning's Dallas Morning News on medical identity theft. I'm constantly harping that the biggest damage from medical record privacy is not the loss of actual medical information, but the risk that other information (especially social security numbers or other account or financial information) will be used for ID theft...

UCSF task force

Posted on May 29, 2008
UCSF Update: the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center suffered a couple of high-profile PHI breaches recently. The Chancellor of the university has appointed a task force to review what similar systems are doing elsewhere in the nation, and adopt appropriate procedures.

EMR penetration in Texas

Posted on May 28, 2008
EMR Penetration in Texas: the Dallas Morning News has an article on the rates of physician adoption of EMR technology in Texas. Pretty basic stuff -- high cost and fear of non-interoperability drive the decision not to go electronic -- and little discussion of the privacy angle...

anti-fundraising article

Posted on May 27, 2008
This is pretty ridiculous: Nonprofit hospitals survive on fundraising, volunteer efforts, etc. Some would close without that type of support. HIPAA allows covered entities to use the demographic information they have on patients to solicit donations from those patients...

Google's online PHR launches

Posted on May 20, 2008
Google this: If you haven't seen the news yet, Google has launched its much-touted new online personal health record, Google Health. It will be interesting to see how it all works out. Is there a market for this? Will privacy concerns ruin the soup? We'll see.

OCR Brochures

Posted on May 19, 2008
OCR HIPAA Privacy Brochures: The Office of Civil Rights, assigned to enforce HIPAA privacy, has published HIPAA privacy brochures for consumers, in several languages. You can access them here.

Doctor email

Posted on May 16, 2008
Doctor Email: Most people want to be able to communicate with their doctor by email. Many would even be willing to pay extra for it. But still, most doctor's don't do it. Why? Mainly because of concerns about privacy and security. The privacy Nazis have them scared...

PHR by cellphone

Posted on May 15, 2008
iPHR?: AccessMyRecords.com, an online personal medical record vendor, has added functionality that will allow smartphone users to access their medical records via their cell phones. Very interesting idea, from the "patient empowerment" standpoint. But I'm sure the privacy nazis think it's a terrible development...

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