Coming off of my Facebook-focused blog from yesterday, I'll turn to the recent leak of State Dept. documents on WikiLeaks. Read »

The most well-known patient privacy advocate voiced her support for the Dept. of Health and Human Services' new patient privacy policy. Read »

Another misguided, uninformed EHR vendor will discount the price of EHR software for doctors willing to sell patient data! According to CEO Jonathan Bush, "Athena might be able to halve the amount that physicians pay to use its EHR." Read »

In a March 23 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Deborah Peel, MD, founder of the Patient Privacy Rights and leader of the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy, argues that unless we put patients in control of their electronic healthcare records and put safeguards in place to make that data secure and private, the push to have a nationwide EHR system will fail. Peel is absolutely correct. Read »

It's not a surprise that there would be supporters and detractors of the proposed meaningful use requirements. With heavyweights making noise, however, you have to sit up straight and listen. Read »

One of the biggest challenges, if not the biggest challenge, of EMRs and EHRs is ensuring that the data is secure and patient privacy honored. There will always be a camp that thinks EMRs and EHRs can never be secured and we ought not use them. That's not the reality today, so we as an industry and a society need to keep the discussion going on how we can trust electronic patient data. Read »

Vitaly Shmatikov, associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, co-authored a "de-anonymization" study that was able to re-identify Netflix customers whose data was previously de-identified by analyzing publicly available data on those customers. Read »