It’s only your private health history
By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer – Sun Aug 21, 4:33 pm ET
SAN FRANCISCO – Until recently, medical files belonging to nearly 300,000 Californians sat unsecured on the Internet for the entire world to see.
There were insurance forms, Social Security numbers and doctors’ notes. Among the files were summaries that spelled out, in painstaking detail, a trucker’s crushed fingers, a maintenance worker’s broken ribs and one man’s bout with sexual dysfunction.
At a time of mounting computer hacking threats, the incident offers an alarming glimpse at privacy risks as the nation moves steadily into an era in which every American’s sensitive medical information will be digitized.
Electronic records can lower costs, cut bureaucracy and ultimately save lives. The government is offering bonuses to early adopters and threatening penalties and cuts in payments to medical providers who refuse to change.
But there are not-so-hidden costs with modernization.
“When things go wrong, they can really go wrong,” says Beth Givens, director of the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which tracks data breaches. “Even the most well-designed systems are not safe. … This case is a good example of how the human element is the weakest link.”
Southern California Medical-Legal Consultants, which represents doctors and hospitals seeking payment from patients receiving workers’ compensation, put the records on a website that it believed only employees could use, owner Joel Hecht says.
The personal data was discovered by Aaron Titus, a researcher with Identity Finder who then alerted Hecht’s firm and The Associated Press. He found it through Internet searches, a common tactic for finding private information posted on unsecured sites.
The data were “available to anyone in the world with half a brain and access to Google,” Titus says. Keep Reading
Related articles
- New data spill shows risk of online health records (ctv.ca)
- 10 Largest Hacker Attacks (thedailybeast.com)
- Rush to digitize medical records a bad prescription for security (h30501.www3.hp.com)
- January 28, 2011 is Data Privacy Day (prweb.com)
- ‘BreachFest’ may sound funny, but expert says digital security has been a concern for years (theprovince.com)
Thom Gillespie
August 22, 2011
Ok, health records? Big deal what isn’t online? Personal information?
And then the far more interesting questions? Who you gonna trust more with your information” Government or Goldman Sachs? One might sell you out but one is designed to sell you out.
wdednh
August 22, 2011
Great Post, thank you 🙂
Bob57
August 23, 2011
HIPAA privacy is little more than a lie of convenience. Check out the provision for “Business Partner Agreements”. This allows your healthcare provider to give their records in toto to anyone with whom they have signed such an agreement. Further, that partner may have Business Partners of their own. Your confidential information is not confidential.
Don’t ever tell your physician anything which you would not want the government to know as the government may be one of those “Business Partners”. This has potentially disastrous implications as medical clinics begin to use the AMA’s patient survey which asks questions like, “do you own a gun?”.
Thom Gillespie
August 23, 2011
The entire privacy issues is about technology not politics.HIPAA is an attempt to deal with technology with policy which never works.
Why does anyone have to ask you if you own a gun when there is form 4473?
Bob57
August 24, 2011
The health questionnaire is an attempt by the AMA to turn gun control into a health issue. If they can turn gun ownership into a health risk, then the next step is to get life insurance companies and private health insurance companies to either deny policies to gun owners, or make those policies prohibitively expensive. This is classic left-wing incrementalism at its finest.
Thom Gillespie
August 24, 2011
Considering:
“Every year just over 30,000 people die in the US from gunshot wounds. Every two years more US citizens are killed by gunshot wounds than were lost in the entire Vietnam war.
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_gunshot_deaths_occur_each_year_in_the_US#ixzz1VxUUMRB2”
So definitely is a health and death issue. Remember that number above is for ‘killed’ not wounded, much higher. And since it is health and death the insurance industry is definitely interested and probably already data mining this information from your credit card purchases. Worrying about AMA is silly if you know anything about how data mining and information sharing works in the 21st century.
Bob57
August 25, 2011
From the CDC:
2007: 12,632 homicides by firearm
Then, I guess we’d better ban all guns!
No, wait:
2007: 42,031 deaths by motor vehicle accident
Ban all cars! Stay home!
No, wait:
2007: 29,846 deaths by unitentional poinsonings
Better not eat anything!
2007: 22,631 deaths by unintentional falls.
That’s it – ban gravity AND food!