Study finds Electronic Health Records vulnerable
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Vulnerabilities in healthcare software often go unreported.
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Blog: Stanford and Harvard researchers find that electronic records aren't helping to improve outpatient medical care.
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Computerization of health care record keeping remains both a need and a challenge, said IT and health care dignitaries at an IBM-sponsored conference in San Jose, Calif. on Monday.
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Security weaknesses have left millions of elderly, disabled and poor Americans vulnerable to unauthorized disclosure of their medical and other personal records, federal investigators said yesterday.
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Some US computer users vastly under-estimate the dangers of going online, a survey shows.
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Computer systems designed to prevent medication errors in hospitals can actually contribute to mistakes, according to a new report.
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InfoWorld - Computerization of health care record keeping remains both a need and a challenge, said IT and health care dignitaries at an IBM-sponsored conference in San Jose, Calif. on Monday.
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Latest variant poses a risk to home and small office users.
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(InfoWorld) - The communications network used to transmit medical data for the U.S. government's Medicare and Medicaid programs has security vulnerabilities that could expose patients' medical data and other personal information, according to a report released Tuesday. The report, released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), identified 47 weaknesses in the way the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) used a WAN (wide-area network) operated by an unnamed contractor. CMS uses the network to transmit claims data -- including patient names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses and medical information -- to health-care facilities, contractors, financial institutions, and state Medicaid offices. "A security breach in this communication network could lead to interruptions in the processing of medical claims or to unauthorized access to personally identifiable medical data, seriously diminishing the public's trust in CMS's ability to protect the sensitive beneficiary data it is entrusted with," the GAO said in the report. GAO, in its review of CMS security procedures early this year, found that the agency and contractor did not use adequate identification and authentication controls for access to the network, did not restrict user access to only those programs and files workers need, did not close off all access from the private network to the Internet and did not consistently encrypt sensitive data. CMS did not always ensure security policies it has in place, GAO said. "CMS did not always ensure that its contractor effectively implemented controls designed to prevent, limit, and detect electronic access to sensitive computing resources and to devices used to support the communication network," the GAO said. GAO gave CMS an early copy of the report, and Dr. Mark McClellan, CMS administrator, said in a July 10 letter the agency took quick action to fix the problems. CMS, working with its contractor, had fixed 22 of the 47 vulnerabilities identified by the July letter, and an additional 14 were scheduled to be fixed within weeks. The final 11 vulnerabilities were "somewhat more complex" and were scheduled to be fixed by Jan. 7, he wrote. "We are taking further steps to assure that none result in actual security breaches," McClellan added. "We have been proactive in our oversight of the network but are taking further steps to enhance security." GAO does not typically name contractors in its reports because its focus is on agency performance, a GAO spokesman said. A CMS spokesman said he did not know which contractor was involved in the network targeted by the GAO report. CMS uses multiple contractors, he said. The Medicare program is the nation's largest health-insurance program, covering 42 million U.S. citizens.
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When folks in the health-care field start crapping all over a major data collection institute such as the Canadian Institute for Health Information, you know that they&#39;re a little on the defensive.
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Digital patient records could become building blocks in a nationwide biomedical computer network for assembling and distributing up-to-the-minute studies of disease.
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Beta search app creates vulnerabilities that may threaten your data's security.
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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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According to new British study, patients who use the internet to find out information about chronic disease rather than listening to their doctor could be putting their health at risk.
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SEATTLE -- Washington state&#39;s Medicaid system cannot account for 1.4 million pills, thousands of people who are dead or lack Social Security numbers are receiving benefits and abuse of mental patients may be unreported, auditors believe.
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Threats to data security are mounting, especially from within organizations, but top executives aren&#39;t helping their companies keep pace, a new study has found.
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Lousy code, PHP and shell script attacks and search engine hacking tools lead to vulnerabilities, study says.