Politico reports: The British government is considering plans to sell health data to private firms without patient consent, weeks after a public outcry over privacy forced it to scrap a similar scheme. Buried in new guidelines on how to handle patient data, and barely mentioned by the Department of Health, is a recommendation that all…
Category: Healthcare
Prioritize student mental health
Keep the secret or save a life? The choice should be clear: prioritize student mental health, but we need mechanisms that permit that. Michael Pridemore and Kim Pridemore, the parents of a college student who committed suicide in 2014, wrote an opinion piece in The News-Gazette. Their piece addresses the need for colleges to be…
Judge: Texted ‘death scene’ pics of man shot by NM cop didn’t violate privacy rights
Mark Oswald reports: A federal judge has ruled that no constitutional right to privacy was violated when a New Mexico State Police officer used his personal cellphone to take and text to friends pictures of the body of a Santa Fe-area man who had been shot and killed by police in 2011. In an order…
UK: Data security: Will new consent and opt-out plans protect our personal health information?
With the problematic care.data program now thankfully dead, Dr Neil Bhatia turns his attention to current proposals. He writes, in part: Dame Caldicott’s review says the proposed consent/opt-out model will need to be piloted extensively before being introduced. However the opt-out proposals are potentially open to abuse, if, as suggested, one option is to have ‘NHS’…