Privacy storm descends on Dutch health care database
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Details about every citizen revealed The Dutch Data Protection Authority is investigating claims that a medical database set up by health insurance companies reveals details about nearly every Dutch citizen.â¦
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Advances in genetic testing are straining the sacred bond of confidentiality between doctor and patient as physicians grapple with whether to keep private diagnoses that might also afflict patients' relatives.
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The sweeping four-year-old federal privacy law known by the acronym HIPAA, for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, may be responsible for an unintended consequence: impeding biomedical research.
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Scathing judgement on junior doc debacle The Information Commissionerâs Office has slated the Department of Health over a data protection debacle that saw Doctorâs intimate personal details plastered over the web.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - European data protection officials are expanding their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy, afterÂ initially targeting Google Inc. last month, European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx said in an interview late Wednesday. A panel of European data protection officials called the Article 29 Working Group decided Wednesday to request information from Google's rivals amid concerns that search engines are holding onto information about the people who use them for too long, Hustinx said. Hustinx, a senior member of the working group, declined to name the companies. However, they are believed to include Yahoo Inc., Lycos Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live.com. The working group will make a general assessment of the state of European citizens' privacy in relation to search engines at its meeting in October or December, he said. "We will issue a generic paper from which national data protection authorities can address players in their jurisdictions," Hustinx said Google does present specific problems, he added, because so many of its services pose a possible threat to privacy. He mentioned Google Earth and Gmail, Google's Web-based e-mail service. Compiling information about people from the various different Web services could compound the threat to privacy, he said. Google has already replied to the letter it received from the working group last month. "The use of the Internet the way Google is doing it could introduce tremendous privacy problems. We will study the company's response to our letter very carefully," Hustinx said. "If the picture they give is not accurate or not justified we might find ourselves on a collision course," he said, but he added, "That's not my sense at the moment." In Google's response , the company offered to shorten the time it keeps Web searches to 18 months from two years. The company also promised to look at shortening the lifespan of cookies it deposits on computers. Google presently stores cookies, including ones that remember what language a person speaks, for 30 years. Google's cooperation impressed Hustinx until now. "I welcome a big company that is investing in privacy. This isn't just window dressing," he said, echoing comments he made at a data protection conference last month in Amsterdam. Broadening its examination beyond Google is an obvious next step, according to Danny Sullivan, who writes for searchengineland.com. He compared the cookie policies of Google, Windows Live and Yahoo and found that Yahoo stores the data for as long as Google while Windows Live stores the information for 14 years. However, Windows Live deposited far more cookies on computers than Google and Yahoo. Using a clean version of Windows Internet Explorer 7, Sullivan set it to reveal all cookies. Windows Live left 14 cookies as soon as he did a search; Yahoo left six, while Google left just two. "Both Google and Yahoo have 30-year cookies. So where's the letter for Yahoo from the Working Group? And isn't 14 years from Microsoft excessive?" Sullivan wrote. Yahoo and Microsoft both say they take privacy very seriously. "Microsoft has a long-term commitment to providing customers with control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information. While we have not received formal communication from the Article 29 Working Party, we recognize that online search is creating legitimate concerns about privacy and are actively engaged with data protection authorities around the world to ensure that our practices meet the highest standards when it comes to protecting privacy," Microsoft said in a statement. "Our users' trust is one of Yahoo's most valuable assets. That's why maintaining that trust and protecting our users' privacy is paramount to us. Our data retention practices vary according to the diverse nature of our services," Yahoo said. Â
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Advances in genetic testing are placing strains on the principle of doctor-patient confidentiality, as doctors grapple with whether to tell a patient&#39;s relatives
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Sensors will be used to relay data to medical files.
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Vulnerabilities in healthcare software often go unreported.
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Congress urged to require standards in health care databases so private firms can exchange information as needed.
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Issues of privacy  -  and bureaucracy  -  have hampered health officials trying to avert an outbreak of the disease
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Medical research often leads to unexpected breakthroughs in other peripheral areas.Based on the success being enjoyed by a project developed among a handful of leading pharmacy industry players, some experts say that you can add enhanced data security to the long list of advancements attributable to the health care industry.Founded in 2001, RxHub was the brainchild of three of the nation's largest pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) -- companies responsible for handling the unseen legwork necessary to allow pharmacies to dole out prescriptions to eligible consumers, and for customers to employ their health care benefits to cover related expenses.Those companies -- AdvancePCS (since acquired by CVS-Caremark), Express Scripts, and Medco Health Solutions -- were looking for a way to better facilitate the massive volumes of data transfer needed to match customers with their medical, insurance, and payment records to cut costs and eliminate potential mistakes.In creating RxHub, a joint venture that serves as an electronic clearinghouse responsible for gathering the medical and benefits data needed to serve customers, people involved with the project claim that the pharmacy companies also pioneered an information-sharing model that other businesses may want to emulate to relieve their own data security headaches.At its core, RxHub claims to be a universal communication framework that links health care providers, insurance companies, the PBMs, and local pharmacies for the purpose of sharing electronic records and prescription data.One of the most attractive side benefits of the venture, backers claim, is that it in addition to streamlining that process, the effort has also helped the partners pilot a new manner in which to access and correlate sensitive information to protect the interests of the many businesses and customers they serve.Rather than forcing any of the firms in the prescription drug food chain to create additional databases for the purpose of providing records to their various external partners, RxHub serves in a data transport role that mines information from all the sources in real time to process transactions, without ever aggregating the information itself.Built around master data management software provided by vendor Initiate Systems, the RxHub infrastructure allows the involved parties to perform all the records validation work necessary for pharmacies to verify prescription and payment information in a matter of seconds, without demanding that anyone in the ecosystem create or retain any additional records.In doing so, the system allows the companies to live up to the demands of regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), while protecting themselves from potential data leakage incidents, RxHub executives said."The idea was to create a hub for all of this sensitive data without ever creating a master database where the information itself would be stored; we're more like FedEx, we look at the routing information, handle the package, and get it there reliably," said JP Little, chief executive of RxHub."We've been very careful about how we architected these systems and our business itself from the get-go in terms of not wanting to retain any data," he said. "This work was being done before we existed, but there was no hub; serving that role in the middle, the responsibility for security and controls remains with that various stakeholders, and the risk is lowered across the entire process."RxHub effectively specializes in real-time data mining, built on Initiate's Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI) technology.When a patient requests a prescription at a pharmacy using the tools -- which currently cover an estimated 135 million U.S. consumers -- the transaction is pushed through RxHub, which in turn verifies the involved person's information wherever it is stored by the various PBMs and health care providers involved.Rather than creating a central record of all of that data, or storing any related information itself, the company merely delivers the relevant results regarding eligibility and payment details to the pharmacy, which can dole out the involved medicines and patient benefits.?By eliminating the need to create additional databases of patient information throughout all the businesses involved, both the companies themselves and consumers covered by the system are less likely to become victimized by leakage events or attacks, proponents of the system say."A hacker would need to break into one of the PBMs or some other element of the overall prescribing system to get this data, we don't actually have it," Little said. "The idea is to eliminate the need to create additional databases; we access the data needed to carry out the transaction from all these different sources, but we never retain it; that's the beauty of this type of an industry hub model."Officials with Initiate say that the distributed architecture approach being utilized by the pharmacy sector is catching on throughout a number of other areas within the health care industry, including some government projects.Driven primarily by concerns around HIPAA and other regulations in the health care sector, company officials said that similar mandates in other markets such as the financial services space and even the law enforcement industry are driving interest from other types of organizations."With this type of data mining, companies are able to tie together separate systems in a real-time environment without putting themselves at risk of a data leakage event or an attack on the information," said Scott Schumacher, chief scientist for Initiate."Companies can create centralized registries for these types of customer records that gather the data from source systems without ever disturbing it, or retaining anything that could be used to carry out fraud," he said. "We believe that along with a number of other benefits to business, this approach also creates a more dynamic security model for data sharing, and we're hearing from many different types of organizations today who have an interest in doing something similar."Schumacher said that Initiate typically competes for deals with IT industry giants IBM and Oracle, which have built similar systems for fostering secure information federation among business partners.And some industry watchers agree that the strategy adopted by RxHub in the pharmacy business could appeal to other types of firms, in particular retailers, as they struggle with issues of data retention, protection, and regulatory compliance."This type of approach is already being used in the public sector, intelligence community, and in the financial services industry," said Ray Wang, analyst at Forrester Research. "Whether it is tracking down suspects or identifying risk among credit bureaus, in effect, the idea is to find a quick match and link without the saving of data to ensure that no information is inappropriately saved, or can be leaked."
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Propose switch to decentralised, interoperable databases The Tory party has put forward a rescue plan for the NHS IT system in the wake of the latest government data losses, which were revealed over the weekend. Nine English NHS trusts have owned up to large scale losses of personal data, and although in most cases the nature of this data has yet to be revealed, City &amp; Hackney Primary Care Trust reportedly mislaid the names and addresses of 160,000 children.â¦
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The transfer of confidential banking records by a Belgium-based company to U.S. authorities for use in anti-terrorism investigations breached Belgian and likely European Union data privacy rules, top government officials said Thursday.
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The real privacy issues are being raised by Google, Yahoo, AOL and others, which are tracking users in order to show them advertising targeted to their interests.
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Every 14-year-old in England will have their personal details recorded on a permanent database raising privacy fears.
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Privacy advocates are concerned that an implantable microchip designed to help doctors tap into a patient's medical records could undermine confidentiality or could even be used to track the patient's movements.
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Hospitals across the country grapple with infringement of patients' privacy caused by employees using camera phones.