DoH sticks to 'opt out' for patient e-records
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Patients have a 'realistic' period to opt out The Department of Health (DoH) has stuck by the "implied consent" model for the central collection of electronic patient records in England, but will provide support for those who want to opt outâ¦
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Patients worried that surgeons may mistakenly operate on the wrong limb or organ can put away the pens and markers. A new device approved for sale yesterday by the Food and Drug
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Keeping mum on care records Plans to upload medical records onto a central database - the so-called spine - will put patient confidentiality at risk, Connecting for Health (CfH) has been told by its own consultants.â¦
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A censored selection will be deigned suitable for consumption
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Time's running out to switch your Part D provider.
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Restrictive hardware and convoluted rights management crimp consumer choices.
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An electronic petition of the UK Prime Minister's office that garnered 1,414 signatures calling flatly for a ban on the use of digital rights management techniques in all digital content, was not so flatly, though quite clearly rejected on Monday. A December report commissioned by Her Majesty's Treasury may have prompted the rejection.
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The system eventually will lead to all patients having an individual electronic record. Online booking will mean doctors and patients can make hospital appointments at their convenience.
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Where was the tneder process? The Department of Health ignored procurement guidelines and pursued a back room deal with an informatics company, according to a committee of MPs.â¦
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Sears Holdings has taken part of its Managemyhome.com Web site offline following revelations that the site was making customers&#39; purchasing histories publicly available.Sears disabled the site&#39;s &quot;Find your products&quot; section on Friday following criticism from privacy advocates, who said that fraudsters could use information provided by the site to scam Sears customers.&quot;We take our customers&#39; privacy concerns very seriously. As a result, we have turned off the ability to view a customer&#39;s purchase history on Manage My Home until we can implement a validation process that will restrict access by unauthorized third parties,&quot; said Sears spokeswoman Kimberly Freely in an e-mail.&quot;We appreciate the efforts of those who brought the issue to our attention,&quot; she added. Customers with concerns can contact Sears directly at 1-800-803-6775.The feature was supposed to be used by customers who wanted &quot;easy access to useful information about products they have purchased,&quot; she added.Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips, and get home renovation ideas. However, &quot;Find your products&quot; would&#160;return purchase information history on any Sears customer, provided the search included the name, phone number, and address of the person.This was a violation of Sears&#39; own online privacy policy, which does not allow the company to share users&#39; purchase history with the general public, according to Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who blogged about the issue on Friday.&quot;It seems like pulling the feature is the right decision at this point,&quot; Edelman said in an interview on Friday. But he warned it was &quot;not immediately obvious&quot; how Sears could bring it back without running into further privacy problems.Sears, the third-largest retailer in the United States, has also been in hot water for its My SHC Community portal, which&#160;downloads invasive ComScore Web tracking software&#160;to some users.Sears has defended its use of the tracking software, pointing out that users are notified of the software&#39;s features before they download it, but researchers such as Edelman have said that the company doesn&#39;t do a good enough job of telling users what the software actually does.According to Edelman, the privacy slip-ups may stem from logistical challenges posed by Sears&#39; 2005 merger with Kmart. &quot;There&#39;s a huge transition there,&quot; he said. &quot;Getting that ship pointed in the right direction could deeply challenge IT. There are a whole lot of ways to do it wrong.&quot;
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Health care advocates say government support of electronic data can improve care and prevent errors.
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By Emily Berry, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.  Sep. 24--Thousands of Erlanger employees' names and Social Security numbers stored electronically disappeared from a locked office last week, and hospital officials are notifying them in letters sent Friday.
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Google Health will let people create a profile that includes information about medications and medical records.
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Not compulsion - sign here to end the pain... "Various forms of coercion" could be used to accelerate the rollout of ID cards, the idea being that ID cards will remain 'voluntary' for as long as possible, while not having an ID card will become more and more uncomfortable. This, precisely what the government has intended to do all along, is stated baldly in an Identity &amp; Passport Service leak cited by the Sunday People.â¦
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By Suzanne Hoholik, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio  Feb. 12--Ideally, patients could go to any central Ohio hospital and, with a few taps on a keyboard, staff members could read their medical histories.
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Of course people would like to have an item-level opt-in, to guarantee a post would earn a top position on TechMeme, but obviously that's impractical, so why not give us the power to say  please don't include this story in TechMeme, it's too meta. When I say a piece is too meta, it's not news, it's what the Big Media guys call a process piece. For example, I would prefer to not have this piece, the one you're reading right now, on TechMeme. It's now meta-meta, because I'm talking about the meta-ness of the piece. You can see this could go on forever, now I'm in meta-meta-meta mode. For a brief moment I went into quadruple meta mode. Oh the humanity. (Sometimes I get so deep into a joke I wonder if people are still with me.) Seriously, some pieces just shouldn't be on TechMeme. And I know which ones those are. So instead of making me turn off the TM spider for my whole site, why not give me a way to say "Stop TechMeme spider, this item is off-limits." We could come up with a TechMeme namespace for RSS 2.0. I'd be happy to help.  Namaste!
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A trio of ugly situations mean hard times for healthcare organizations too lazy or sloppy to get right with HIPAA requirements. Columnist Jon Espenschied has a secret for making sure you're not next.