Patient data loss affects 168,000
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The government says the loss of patient records by NHS Trusts affects 168,000 people.
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Doctors try to balance a patient's trust with new technology.
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By MARTHA McKAY, STAFF WRITER  Ever worry about being so sick that you need a doctor's care while stuck in a strange city, far from your family physician and your medical records?  Now imagine handing the new doctor a tiny data storage device which she then plugs into a PC.
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The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers is soaring to unprecedented levels, and the trend isn't expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information.
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Portable device may have been stolen from an Alabama medical center and may house data on as many as 48,000 vets.
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(Source: AT&T)  The federal government has awarded more than $139 million to help healthcare providers move medical records more easily within a geographic region. The hope is that Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO) will be the building blocks of a National Health Information Network.
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The head of the U.K. National Health Service has defended plans to build a centralized database of patient records following another embarrassing loss of personal information by the government.The U.K. Department of Health admitted this weekend that nine of its regional NHS trusts have reported losing patient data. One of the trusts, the City and Hackney Primary Care Trust, in east London, lost the medical records for about 160,000 children, according to newspaper reports. The total number of records has not been disclosed.The losses emerged as part of a wider review following similar government blunders, and have revived questions about the security of building a centralized patient records database, part of the U.K.&#39;s National Programme for IT (NPfIT). But David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, said the project is essential and should go ahead.&quot;It&#39;s vitally important that when a doctor is sitting in front of a patient they have all the information they need at their fingertips, and that&#39;s what&#39;s been driving us through all this,&quot; Nicholson told BBC Radio 4&#39;s Today program on Monday.The proposed system will not be a single large records database, but a series of interconnected regional databases, he said. And the security system will be more rigorous than that used with most Internet banking systems, according to Nicholson.&quot;You&#39;d need a user name, a password and a smart card [to access patient records] and you would have role-controlled access,&quot; he said. &quot;So a nurse on a ward with a smart card and a password could only access a relatively small number of patient records.&quot;The information that was reported lost over the weekend was encrypted and so not vulnerable to misuse, Nicholson said.But Ross Anderson, a security expert at the University of Cambridge, told Radio 4 that whether the data is encrypted is not the main issue.&quot;One of the questions you have to ask here is not whether the data was encrypted or password protected, but why someone was able to have access to 160,000 children&#39;s records,&quot; he said. &quot;In private industry ... if someone tried to make off with hundreds of thousands of records the alarms would sound.&quot;Opposition leaders pounced on the latest misstep as evidence that the Labour government can&#39;t be trusted with its citizens&#39; data. They called for further studies to show how the proposed patient records system would protect privacy.The incident comes after the U.K.&#39;s HM Revenue and Customs lost personal records for 25 million Britons, and the Driving Standards Agency lost records for more than 3 million learner drivers.&quot;The power of technology means it can be very easy to use the information, but also very easy to lose the information,&quot; the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said on the Today program. &quot;The events of the last few weeks have woken up everybody to the importance of taking these matters seriously.&quot;&#160;
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Doctors need guidance on how to avoid problems using technology to reach patients, says a researcher.
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(InfoWorld) - A stolen laptop at The Boeing Co. has pushed a widely watched tally of U.S. data breach victims past the 100 million mark. On Tuesday, Boeing disclosed that files containing Social Security numbers, names and home addresses of 382,000 current and former employees were compromised in early December when an unencrypted laptop was stolen from an employee's car. That disclosure pushed the total number of data breach victims on the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Web site to 100,152,801, said Beth Givens, director of the consumer advocacy group. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has been tracking data breaches since February 2005, whenÂ ChoicePoint disclosedÂ that thieves had stolen information on 163,000 victims from the company's database. The ChoicePoint incident was remarkable because although the data broker was obligated to disclose the theft to victims living in California -- the only state with a beach notification law on the books -- it decided to notify everyone, Givens said. "That was the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that a breached entity decided to disclose the event to individuals nationwide," she said. "That was a watershed event," she added, "because other entities that had experienced breaches started disclosing the situation to individuals nationwide" Since the ChoicePoint incident, data security has been in the spotlight, andÂ breaches at the U.S. Department of Veteran's AffairsÂ and, most recently, Boeing and theÂ University of California-Los Angeles, have received national attention. Givens believes that the actual number of names that have been compromised since ChoicePoint is probably much higher than her tally. "I think the number 100 million is largely a fictional number, but what it really indicates is that this is a very significant problem," she said. She couldn't say whether all the publicity has made consumers any more secure. "It's quite obvious from the listing that we've compiled that we're in a very leaky boat when it comes to data security," she said. "I don't think that consumers can feel confident about the protection that their personal information receives."
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An investigation is launched after the payroll details of staff at an NHS hospital are lost.
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Sometimes it's tough for patients to tell the whole story.
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Personal information on about 650,000 customers of J.C. Penney and up to 100 other retailers could be compromised after a computer tape went missing.
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An implanted wireless device did not keep enough patients with weak hearts out of the hospital to prove its effectiveness.
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Security weaknesses have left millions of elderly, disabled and poor Americans vulnerable to unauthorized disclosure of their medical and personal records, federal investigators said Tuesday.
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Vulnerabilities in healthcare software often go unreported.
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Even more worried than Americans One in five (22 per cent) European businesses expect to have to cope with "major data loss" of some sort annually over the next five years compared to 10 per cent of their US counterparts.â¦
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I overheard a long-time hospital client talking to another support vendor today. The hospitalâs patient accounting department was attempting to send patient financial and billing data to a third-party biller. The vendorâs normal Web site was down, and they were trying to come up with an emergency fix.