Amanda Eisenberg reports: Technology is helping close the gap between physical and behavioral healthcare, but professionals say there’s a long way to go in integrating information from the two disciplines. As patient data becomes more easily accessible—by both physicians and hackers—in the age of electronic health records and health information exchanges, privacy concerns have outweighed…
Category: Healthcare
Sanger woman dies, but her legal battle with HealthComp continues
Pablo Lopez reports: Debora Rose of Sanger was a hardworking single mother who enjoyed a good laugh and never missed a sports event involving her grandchildren. When Rose died last month at age 60, she was in the midst of a legal fight with HealthComp Inc., a health-plan administrator for private companies. In her Fresno County…
UK Government Considering New Patient Data Security and Research Consent Standards, Sanctions
Phil Bradley-Schmieg writes: The UK Government has opened a consultation, running until September 7, 2016, regarding how UK National Health Service (NHS) patient data should be safeguarded, and how it could be used for purposes other than direct care (e.g. scientific research). The consultation comes after two parallel-track reviews of information governance and data security arrangements in…
Protecting privacy in genomic databases
From the MIT News Office: Genome-wide association studies, which try to find correlations between particular genetic variations and disease diagnoses, are a staple of modern medical research. But because they depend on databases that contain people’s medical histories, they carry privacy risks. An attacker armed with genetic information about someone — from, say, a skin…