Ben Brody and Naomi Nix report: Data sharing by technology companies is helping government officials fight the dizzying spread of the coronavirus by monitoring compliance with social distancing and stay-at-home orders. It’s also putting privacy experts on edge. Companies including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. were already collecting, for advertising purposes, huge volumes of data from websites…
Category: Healthcare
Google data shines light on whether coronavirus lockdowns worldwide are working
Paresh Dave reports: The analysis of location data from billions of Google users’ phones is the largest public dataset available to help health authorities assess if people are abiding with shelter-in-place and similar orders issued across the world to rein in the virus. The company released reports for 131 countries with charts that compare traffic…
OCR Announces Notification of Enforcement Discretion to Allow Uses and Disclosures of Protected Health Information by Business Associates for Public Health and Health Oversight Activities During The COVID-19 Nationwide Public Health Emergency
Another announcement from OCR: Today, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced, effective immediately, that it will exercise its enforcement discretion and will not impose penalties for violations of certain provisions of the HIPAA Privacy Rule against health care providers or their business associates for…
No, “triage” doesn’t mean that you get to discriminate against immigrants, the disabled, or any other group
Much of the world first seems to be learning what “triage” really means. Even for many healthcare professionals, triage has never been so meaningful, real, or brutal as it is during this pandemic when ventilators and PPE are in short supply. So who gets treated and who doesn’t when you run out of personnel and…