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Insulin pumps are vulnerable to determined hackers who could also remotely mess up the readings of blood-sugar monitors, Jerome Radcliffe, a security researcher who has diabetes revealed at the Black Hat computer security conference, Las Vegas, Nevada. In other words, a hacker could cause a diabetic patient to receive either too much or too little insulin.

hackers security medical devices diabetics Risk

Electronic medical record vendors are taking steps to ensure not only that their products have all the bells and whistles required under meaningful use rules, but also that the products are easy for physicians to use.

EMR vendors usability medical

As a newbie I’m trying to figure this out. But I need to be more mindful of the filter bubble – a self-imposed bias by preferentially linking to people and things we agree with, thus unwittingly trivializing reasonable alternatives.

physician medical filter bubble

Informed consent has long been a bedrock principle of medical ethics, but the form intended to document a patient's understanding of a proposed intervention is too often written at a college reading level and is ambiguous about risks.

Some doctors are out to change that, bringing a personalized medical approach to informed consent.

american medical news risks

"Although identity theft is usually
associated with financial transactions, it also happens in the context of
medical care. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), medical identity
theft occurs when someone uses another person’s name or insurance information to
get medical treatment, prescription drugs or surgery. It also happens when
dishonest people working in a medical setting use another person’s information
to submit false bills to insurance companies.

Medical identity theft is a concern for patients, health care providers, and
health plans. Health care providers and insurers are asking how they can
minimize the risk and help their patients if they’re victimized. Here are the
FTC’s answers to those questions."

medical identity theft FAQ FTC

"The Food and Drug Administration on Feb. 15 will publish a final rule to
reclassify Medical Device Data Systems from Class III devices requiring
premarket approval to Class I devices regulated under much less stringent
general controls."

FDA reclassify Medical Device

" A former Newland Medical Center Employee was charged Monday with 15 counts of identity theft and criminal enterprise.

Camille Butler of Detroit is accused of stealing patient information and giving it to her boyfriend, Artis Cleveland."

Privacy identity theft medical

"Medical data from more than 3,000 patients at Dean Health System and St. Mary's Hospital were stored in a laptop stolen from a doctor's house, prompting Dean and St. Mary's to offer the patients identify theft protection.

The laptop, taken Nov. 8, didn't contain the people's Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers or other financial information, said Kim Sveum, Dean spokeswoman.

Dean and St. Mary's released a statement about the situation Monday. They sent letters Saturday to 3,288 patients who may have been affected. All had surgeries from 2001 through Nov. 8.

The doctor, whom Sveum wouldn't identify, put the patient information on her personal computer, against Dean policy, Sveum said. Data on Dean computers are encrypted, she said.

Sveum wouldn't say if the doctor was disciplined. Dean and St. Mary's "are undertaking comprehensive reviews of this breach of policy" and reminding employees to protect patient privacy, the statement said."

Privacy HIPAA laptop stolen medical

"When Joanna Saenz opened her mail one summer day several years ago, she got
quite a shock.

The news? Joanna Saenz had delivered a baby girl, born July 1, 2006, in
Nebraska, and now it was time to pay the hospital bill.

But Saenz didn't have a daughter, and she had never been in Nebraska.

The baby's mother had appropriated Saenz's identity using a birth certificate
and Social Security card stolen 10 years ago from Saenz, then 17, when she was
in Mexico visiting relatives."

privacy identity theft medical

"Are CEOs people, too? Sure, but the nation's chiefs are working hard as ever
to convince us that there's binding connective tissue between Average Joe and
Boardroom Jane. Each is due medical privacy under the law, the CEOs say.

And they have a point. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees
equal protection under the law, and the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) doesn't discriminate by salary. We're all human.
We're all citizens.

But in the world of business and finance, we are not all equal.
Steve Jobs could trade in his signature black turtleneck for a plaid, flannel
hunter's special and a wire mesh hat with "CAT" emblazoned on the front, and
he'd still be worth $5.5 billion and the 136th-richest person in the world,
according to Forbes. His health and ability to perform as CEO of
Apple
(Nasdaq:
AAPL
)
would still matter materially to the millions who own shares of the Mac
maker."

Privacy CEO Medical

"Nurses and other healthcare providers complied with hand hygiene guidelines less than half of the time before participating in medical procedures, results of a new study showed.

Compliance was better after procedures, with 72% following guidelines after procedures compared with 41.7% before procedures, according to a report published in the May issue of Applied Nursing Research.

Overall compliance with hand hygiene guidelines was just 34.3%."

medical hygiene hand-washing study

"With a push by the Obama administration and others to computerize patient health
rec­ords, cybercriminals see an opportunity ripe for the taking. Other
thieves work as “moles” in physician and insurance offices to steal patient
records."

identity theft medical

"Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, the state's largest health insurer, accidentally published a customer's personal medical information in a handbook prepared for 95,000 members of a popular health care plan, according to the woman's attorney.

The unnamed woman filed suit in Hennepin County District Court this week, accusing Blue Cross of violating the Minnesota Health Records Act and breaching her privacy by disclosing her name and providing confidential information about her medical treatment. While Blue Cross did not describe any procedures she may have received, the company disclosed she had been a patient at the Bemidji Sameday Surgery Center, according to the lawsuit.

Blue Cross spokeswoman Pam Lux said the company discovered the error last year and immediately destroyed or stopped using the material."

Privacy Medical Blue Cross MN

"The Question: About three weeks ago, I received an $838 bill, addressed to my mother, for an emergency visit in Florida last December. My mother passed away in June 2007 and had never been to Florida. Next, I got a notice from my mother's former health insurer, saying it had denied the claim. I'm assuming someone got her insurance information and used it to get treatment.

What I need to know is, what should I or should I not do about this?

Jacki Howard, Russell Township

The Answer: This sounds like a case of medical identity theft, and you should report it.

Medical identity theft involves someone using stolen personal or insurance information to receive medical care. "

Privacy Identity Theft Medical

"About 9 percent of Americans have experienced an identity theft crime directly or through an immediate family member, a new survey shows. Of those crimes, nearly 6 percent involved medical identity theft.

The National Study on Medical Identity Theft, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, a Traverse City, Mich.-based research firm, had 156,000 respondents. The study was sponsored by Experian, a credit rating firm.

The most common form of identity theft, according to the survey, involved fraud committed on a credit card. Other common thefts included obtaining employment under a stolen name, debit card fraud and seized funds in banks or other financial institutions.

Medical ID theft
"The two results that stood out to me were the more than $20,000 average cost to consumers who suffered ID/credit fraud as a result of a medical data breach, as well as the potential for physical harm to those who have their medical records 'polluted' due to healthcare fraud," says Mike Spinney, a senior privacy analyst at Ponemon Institute. "

Privacy Identity Theft 9% Medical

"The American Medical Association, American Dental Association and American Veterinary Medical Association have jointly written to Federal Trade Commission members asking that health professionals be excluded from the Red Flags rule.

The rule requires many businesses, including health care organizations, to take specific steps to minimize identity theft. These steps include identifying suspicious activity involving Social Security numbers, credit reports and other identifying information. This would involve new policies and procedures, and likely implementation of new data security and regulatory compliance software products.

Advertisement

The FTC has delayed enforcement of the Red Flags rule four times as various professions protest their inclusion. The compliance date now is June 1, 2010.
The three medical associations as individual groups have previously pushed for the exemption, saying Congress did not intend to include health professionals. The joint letter follows a recent court ruling that attorneys should be exempted from the rule. In the letter, the associations contend that considerations that led to a federal court decision that exempts attorneys also apply to health professionals. "

Privacy Identity Theft Fraud AMA Medical Dental Veterinarian

Marcia Angell MD is a well-known, respected physician, long-time editor of NEJM. So it was a bit of a shock today when Amy Romano, blogger for Lamaze International, sent me this quote:

"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine".

Medical clinical research e-patients.net_u_2009_09_regina-bmj-9-12-092.jpg

"Medical records for about 15,500 Northern California Kaiser patients - about 9,000 of them in the Bay Area - were compromised after thieves stole an external drive from a Kaiser employee's car last month, Kaiser officials said Tuesday."

Kaiser officials said the electronic device contained patients' names, medical record numbers and possibly ages, genders, telephone numbers, addresses and general information related to their care and treatment.

No Social Security numbers or financial information was contained on the drive, and Kaiser officials said there's no evidence that the information has been used inappropriately. The device was not encrypted, but some of the information was password protected.

Kaiser has sent letters to the 15,500 members and the employee, who Kaiser would not identify, has been fired.

Privacy Medical Data Breach Kaiser

"For five days as her husband lay in his hospital bed suffering from kidney cancer, Regina Holliday begged doctors and nurses for his medical records, and for five days she never received them.

On the sixth day, her husband needed to be transferred to another hospital -- without his complete medical records.

"When Fred arrived at the second hospital, they couldn't give him any pain medication because they didn't know what drugs he already had in his system, and they didn't want to overdose him," says Holliday, who lives in Washington. "For six hours he was in pain, panicking, while I ran back to the first hospital and got the rest of the records."

Despite a federal law requiring hospitals and doctors to release medical records to patients who ask for them, patients are reporting they have a hard time accessing them leading to complications like the ones the Holliday family experienced.

'What part of "Give us our damn data" do you not understand?'"

Privacy Medical Data Access

"UC San Francisco said late Tuesday it has alerted 600 patients and others that an external hacker may have obtained “temporary access to emails containing their personal information” as a result of a late September phishing scam.

The breach occurred about three months ago, and was investigated in mid-October, but wasn’t disclosed to the public until Dec. 15. Corinna Kaarlela, UCSF's news director, told the San Francisco Business Times late Tuesday that individuals whose data may have been compromised were notified between Oct. 21, when an in-depth investigation began, and Dec. 11, when it was completed.

UCSF said Tuesday that an unnamed faculty physician in the School of Medicine was victimized in late September by the alleged scam. The physician provided a user name and password in response to an email message fabricated by a hacker, that appeared as if it came from those responsible for upgrading security on UCSF internal computer servers.

UCSF's Enterprise Information Security unit subsequently identified the breach and disabled the compromised password. UCSF says it conducted an investigation and in mid-October determined that emails in the physician’s account ─ including some containing demographic and clinical information and, in a few cases, Social Security numbers ─ may have been exposed."

Privacy ucsf phishing doctor ssn medical