UCLA Health System Settlement over Privacy Violations

A good summary of the details is here

A Bunch of Reports on Health Information Technology, Privacy, Security, etc.

Recently, there have been several noteworthy reports on the state of the world, and opportunities for information technologies in the biomedical realm. The National Research Council sponsored report, chaired by Bill Stead, is probably the most comprehensive and should serve as a nice roadmap for the next couple of years (and then some):

W. Stead and H. Lin, eds. Computational Technology for Effective Health Care: Immediate Steps and Strategic Directions. National Research Council. Jan 9, 2009.

Also, the recent report compiled by Booz Allen Hamilton provides a clear summary of various issues, including privacy and security, that need to be addressed in the emerging health information economy:

S. Penfield, K. Anderson, M. Edmund, and M. Belanger. Toward Health Information Liquidity: Realization of Better, More Efficient Care from the Free Flow of Health Information. Booz Allen Hamilton. January 2009.

Google Flu Trends & EPIC

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) recently published a document voicing its concerns over Google's use of search queries for its new Flu Trends project. CNET has a good summary of the story.

Government Data Mining, Secrecy, & Privacy

Is the government conducting too much data mining without oversight and transparency? That's what a recent panel thinks (CNET)....

UK & Privacy By Design

(Thanks to Lorrie Cranor for the pointer)

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has published an interesting report on Privacy By Design.

Prescription Writing Records Ruled Confidential in NH

Article at CNN:
"A federal appeals court has upheld the constitutionality of New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation law making doctors' prescription writing habits confidential."

A New Text Scrubber

Researchers at the Regenstrief Institute in Indiana have developed a new rules-based clinical text scrubber for HL7-coded documents.

Article: Protecting patient privacy the new fashioned way

Paper: A software tool for removing patient identifying information from clinical documents