Privacy/Security

In response to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Patient Safety Action & Surveillance Plan, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) recently submitted comments supporting the framework, but urged the agency to seek private and non-government stakeholder input.

At a time of rancorous political divisions, it’s worth noting that most Americans are deeply concerned about the quality of healthcare—in particular, medical research. In a poll by Research!America, 72 percent of respondents say the new Congress and the President should take immediate action to expand medical research within the first hundred days of the 113th Congress. Their views are relevant as Congress considers funding cuts that could affect medical research, but it also suggests that healthcare issues in general are topmost on many people’s minds.

Indiana’s Gibson General Hospital has mailed letters to approximately 29,000 patients informing them of the theft of a hospital laptop containing personal health information.

Data breaches are a large and costly threat for healthcare providers, which so far have been unable to cope with existing and new challenges of securing patient data. That’s a key finding of the Third Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy & Data Security, released by the Traverse City, Mich.-based Ponemon Institute and sponsored by ID Experts, Portland, Ore.

I found the Nov. 13 InformationWeek commentary by Mathew J. Schwartz, titled “Petraeus Fallout: 5 Gmail Security Facts,” to be both entertaining and instructive. As Schwartz puts it simply and eloquently, “Want to avoid a fall from grace? Then ensure you’re not the chief of a spy agency who coordinates your extramarital affairs using a free webmail service. That’s one information security takeaway from the ongoing probe into the former director of the CIA, David Petraeus, who resigned after 14 months on the job.”