Wilmot James, the Democratic Alliance (DA) Shadow Minister of Health, writes: The DA have a letter from the Health Minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, to the Council for Medical Schemes (CMS) in July last year in which he requested the CMS to collect private data about medical scheme members in order maintain a ‘Beneficiary Registry’ of members. His…
Category: Healthcare
Four States Join InterConnect, a Prescription Data Sharing Network
From the press release: More than 55 million people from the states of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Texas are now covered by the prescription monitoring program (PMP) data sharing system administered by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy® (NABP®) and technology partner Appriss Health. The addition of these states to the NABP PMP InterConnect® network brings the total collaboration to 37 states…
Your private medical data is for sale – and it’s driving a business worth billions
Sam Thielman reports: Your medical data is for sale – all of it. Adam Tanner, a fellow at Harvard’s institute for quantitative social science and author of a new book on the topic, Our Bodies, Our Data, said that patients generally don’t know that their most personal information – what diseases they test positive for, what…
A Long-Lost Data Trove Uncovers California’s Sterilization Program
Sarah Zhang has a fascinating article in The Atlantic that raises important questions about privacy and confidentiality in historical-medical research. But the main point of the research – what we are now learning about California’s sterilization program – is so important on so many levels that figuring out how to address it sensitively and with regard for…