Medical Data on Empire Blue Cross Members May Be Lost
538627
A compact disc holding vital medical and other personal information of about 75,000 members of Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield has disappeared.
223361
More than 200,000 heart tests from   patients in prescription drug trials will be collected in a   database so scientists can search for clues about potentially   dangerous cardiac side effects, U.S. health officials said on   Wednesday.
748060
What do you think of the Medicare drug discount-card program? (Check all that apply.). I&#39;m eligible but I don&#39;t use it. Biopsy results confirm a young Dublin man has contracted the human form of mad cow disease.
727975
St. Mary's Hospital in Leonardtown, Md. has become the second hospital in the state in the last week to disclose a potential compromise of patients' personal data.
500090
The U.S. government needs to step up its push for electronic health records because they are not being adopted quickly enough, a group of health advocates said Friday.U.S. healthcare providers continue to make errors that hurt tens of thousands of patients each year, and e-health records could prevent many of those problems, said Dr. Alan Lotvin, senior vice president of oncology for Magellan Health Services Inc. The U.S. healthcare system is failing patients &quot;despite the fact we have the knowledge and the technology to really do a much, much better job.&quot;About 3.5 percent of all U.S. hospital stays have a drug error associated with them, leading to more than 100,000 significant medical problems and nearly 30,000 deaths each year, said Lotvin, speaking at an e-health forum sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Health IT Now Coalition.U.S. residents should have a &quot;sense of outrage&quot; when confronted with these prescription errors, which would largely be prevented with e-health records, Lotvin said. He compared the U.S. health-care system&#39;s record to Amazon.com, which received 2,000 orders per minute during the 2005 holiday shopping season.&quot;I use Amazon a lot -- I have never gotten the wrong book,&quot; he said. &quot;We can&#39;t seem to get the pills from the pharmacy in the basement to Mrs. Smith in room 631 correctly. This is not acceptable.&quot;Lotvin called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would mandate that healthcare providers report their error rates. He also called for a law that would require healthcare providers that have made mistakes on a patient to pay for any subsequent care required. Many medical errors can result in long hospital stays or expensive procedures, and in many cases, patients or their insurance providers pay, he said.&quot;You break it, you fix it,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s a very simple concept. It&#39;s been around in china shops for years.&quot;In addition, the ITIF, in a report released Friday, recommended several steps Congress could take to encourage the adoption of e-health records:*&#160;Congress should pass legislation that supports the adoption of national health data standards. The report mentioned two bills that provide funding and organization at a national level, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act in the Senate, and the Promoting Health Information Technology Act in the House of Representatives.*&#160;Congress should pass a bill to support the creation of health record data banks, data centers where individual patients could store and control their health data. The Independent Health Record Trust Act in the House would regulate data bank operators, prohibiting them from charging fees to health-care providers for accessing or updating an e-health record upon permission of the patient.*&#160;The U.S. government should lead by example by covering the monthly access fees at health record data banks for patients covered by government-funded programs such as Medicare and the State Children&#39;s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).*&#160;Congress should allow patients free access to e-health records held by healthcare providers. Currently, medical privacy laws allow patients to get paper copies of their medical records, but healthcare providers can charge fees for copying and mailing those records. Congress should phase out those fees, a measure that would encourage doctors to move to electronic records, ITIF said.Currently, only about 25 percent of U.S. doctors use e-health records, and only about 10 percent of them have e-health records fully integrated into their practices, ITIF said. But in Sweden, 90 percent of doctors use e-health records, and in Denmark, 88 percent do, according to the ITIF.That shows that adoption in the U.S. is a matter of the right policies and incentives, said Robert Atkinson, ITIF&#39;s president. &quot;This is not rocket science,&quot; he said.More people need to push Congress to create incentives for e-health records, added Nancy Johnson, a former U.S. representative and co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition.&quot;Why, when we know this would help so much, are we not doing it?&quot; Johnson said. &quot;We know how to deliver a higher quality of care, and we&#39;re not doing it.&quot;
400950
Thousands of Massachusetts senior citizens with Medicare drug benefits have received automated phone calls from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts in recent days asking them to repay up to $1,400 because Medicare failed to automatically deduct monthly premiums from their Social Security checks.
345780
Wonder why they ever called them NHS Trusts... A laptop containing medical records for more than 5,000 people has been lost by a hospital near Dudley.â¦
212323
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...
718013
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.
143935
The government says the loss of patient records by NHS Trusts affects 168,000 people.
152297
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.
195458
A complaining patient removed from a medical practice's list has prompted concerns about new doctors' contracts.
105165
Advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday will consider the risks of drug-coated stents in patients with medical complications who are not approved for the artery-opening heart devices.
349595
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, research suggested today.
166630
The attorney general is looking into whether insurers forced patients to overpay for out-of-network doctors.
56924
Don't trust NHS IT British doctors are almost unanimous in not trusting the government to adequately secure patients' medical records.â¦
324254
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.