Wellpoint says some patient info disappeared: NYT
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Wellpoint Inc., a managed care firm, has begun notifying 75,000 members of its Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield unit in New York that a compact disc holding their vital medical and other personal information had disappeared, The New York Times reported.
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The personal data of some 237,000 policy holders at Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. -- stored on back-up tapes that were misplaced -- may have been compromised, the company said.
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A backup tape containing credit-card information from hundreds of U.S. retailers is missing, forcing the company responsible for the data to warn customers that they may become the targets of data fraud.GE Money, which manages in-store credit-card programs for the majority of U.S. retailers, first realized that the tape was missing from an Iron Mountain secure storage facility in October, said Richard Jones, a company spokesman. &quot;We were informed that one of the tapes could not be located. But at the same time, there was no record of it ever having been checked out,&quot; he said.The tape contained in-store credit-card information on 650,000 retail customers, including those of J.C. Penney, he said. GE Money employees are also affected by the breach.The missing backup tape was unencrypted.Although J.C. Penney was the only company that Jones would confirm as affected by the missing tape, that retailer accounts for just a small percentage of all accounts that were compromised. In total, 230 retailers are affected by the breach. &quot;Clearly that number includes many of the national retail organizations,&quot; he said.The tape also contained Social Security numbers of 150,000 customers. When matched with name and address information, Social Security numbers can be used to set up fraudulent credit-card accounts, a common form of identity theft.Jones said that following a GE Money investigation, there is no evidence that the tape in question has been stolen or that the data it contained was misused.After reconstructing the data that was on the missing tape, GE Money began sending out letters to those affected by the breach in December. The company has set up a toll-free number and is offering one year of free credit monitoring services to those affected by the breach.In 2006, retailer TJ Maxx discovered that thieves had&#160;broken into its computer networks, stealing an estimated 94 million credit- and debit-card numbers. Costs related to that breach are expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.GE Money is a division of General Electric.
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New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo  has subpoenaed Merck & Co  and Schering-Plough Corp   for documents and information to see whether the  companies hid the results of a study on their cholesterol drug  Vytorin.
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The British Medical Journal has  retracted certain claims about drug maker Eli Lilly and Co.,  its drug Prozac and a potential link to suicide, both sides  said on Thursday.
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The British Medical Journal has  retracted its controversial claims about drug maker Eli Lilly  and Co, its drug Prozac and a potential link to suicide, Lilly  said on Thursday.
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Drug maker Eli Lilly and Co.  LLY.N on Friday said in response to charges made in the  British Medical Journal that it is unaware of any allegations  that documents were missing from its clinical drug trials.
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Drug manufacturers acknowledged Thursday that they face a crisis of credibility they hope to remedy by releasing information about their clinical trials.
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The British Medical Journal has retracted its controversial claims about drug maker Eli Lilly and Co, its drug Prozac and a potential link to suicide, Lilly said on Thursday.
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A misleading article on "missing" Eli Lilly documents could give the usually methodical world of medical journals a black eye.
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Patients are being put at risk because of the secrecy of drug companies which refuse to publish the results of clinical trials, it was claimed today.
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Eli Lilly and Co. has downplayed for about 10 years the risks associated with Zyprexa, which treats schizophrenia, The New York Times said on its Web site Sunday, citing internal documents from the drug maker and e-mail messages of its managers.
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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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New Yorkâs attorney general is looking into if insurers forced patients to overpay for out-of-network doctors.
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Here we go again. The Department of Veterans Affairs has disclosed that information on more than half a million individuals and about 1.3 million non-VA physicians -- both living and deceased -- is missing and may have been stolen. The information had been stored on a portable hard drive that was...
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Health officials said on Friday they  had dropped plans to keep a public list of prescription drugs  with emerging safety concerns, one of the measures proposed  after Merck & Co.'s 2004 withdrawal of its arthritis drug  Vioxx.
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NEW YORK (Dow Jones/AP) _ The New York state comptroller sued Merck &amp; Co., claiming the drug maker hid certain risks associated with the painkiller Vioxx.