Privacy & Security
It was, as always, an eventful year for the health information technology industry, everywhere from hospitals to physician practices, vendor headquarters to the halls of Congress. 2014 was marked by big stories about ICD-10, privacy and security, patient safety, interoperability and more. We spotlight some of them here.
A critical access hospital in southern Illinois was targeted by an unknown party with access to protected health information, who threatened to release more data unless a "substantial" ransom payment was made.
Perhaps CD-ROMs are not the best storage media when it comes to safeguarding the health information of your patients -- especially when one of your staff members accidentally donates them to a children's art project, as what recently happened at a Virginia-based health system.
The risk of experiencing a data breach "is higher than ever," according to Experian's second annual industry forecast, which shows how the "consistently high value of healthcare data on the black market" means there will be little respite for an industry already beleaguered by cyber threats.
Having established a level of trust and familiarity with electronic health records over the past few years, increasing numbers of U.S. patients are looking for more advanced features, such as access to doctors' notes and test results, according to a new survey from the National Partnership for Women & Families.
Despite what seems to be some sustainable momentum beyond the initial rush of excitement, worries remain about Apple's HealthKit platform -- with security concerns and its potential to flood doctors with unnecessary data topping the list. Could the latest big thing eventually go the way of Google Health?
Your organization can have the most well-crafted privacy and security policies in the world. But if those policies are accompanied by lukewarm emphasis and no accountability, or your staff just downright ignores them, you have a big security problem -- just like the folks at one Ohio-based health system did last week.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will pay $100,000 to the state of Massachusetts after one of its physicians failed to follow the hospital's laptop encryption policy and an unencrypted laptop was stolen.
As debate swirls about a recent Institute of Medicine report suggesting that electronic health records collect more non-clinical patient data for population health research, a new poll suggest patients are mostly willing to offer access to anonymized health information -- but only to an extent.
Jay Radcliffe breaks into medical devices for a living, testing for vulnerabilities as a security researcher. He's also a diabetic and gives himself insulin injections instead of relying on an automated insulin pump, which he says could be hacked.