Electronic Health Information and Privacy (the Canadian Way)

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the 3rd Electronic Health Information and Privacy Conference. The conference was overview of work in health privacy from many different perspectives, including behavioral economics (thanks to an excellent presentation of recent research by Alessandro Acquisi), data privacy, law, and policy. Though there was almost a foot of snow on the ground, the workshop was a tremendous success. They had to shuffle around sessions due to various delays at the airports (especially in Toronto) and the roads, but only one session was lost. In general, the majority of the conference focused on privacy and the challenges from a Canadian perspective. Personally, I found it amazing (and refreshing) how many of our neighbors to the north are thinking about technological and social issues.

Thanks to Khaled El Emam at the University of Ottawa for organizing a fantastic day of talks and discussion.

23andme and you and everyone else

I just read an interesting article in Wired on Silicon Valley startup 23andme. The company aims to provide personalized predispositions based on single nucleotide polymorphisms. In short, here's the process: you send them your saliva, they sequence it, map the resulting SNP variants to the existing translational and clinical literature, and then provide you with a web accessible summary of your predispositions. It appears they have a crack team of biomedical and computational advisors. It's certainly something to keep an eye on

Trust Trumps Privacy?

A new study suggests that Internet users are willing to sacrifice privacy in exchange for more trustworthy websites.

An article summarizing the study can be found here.

Clooney Med Privacy Breach

A NJ hospital recently discovered (or just revealed) that more than twenty employees inappropriately accessed George Clooney's electronic medical record. Personally, I don't find this surprising, but I'm amazed that the hospital didn't have any protections in place for VIPs (How about a pseudonym?). Though the incident occurred, let's not be too quick to jump to conclusions about the hospital's data management or data access policies. The story is still unfolding.

Microsoft and Personal Health Records

If you keep up with the popular news outlets, then you've seen the fanfare associated with Microsoft's new online personal health record system, HealthVault. If not, here are several links to NY Times stories:

1: 10/4/07: Microsoft Rolls Out Personal Health Records

2: 10/5/07: Microsoft System to Track Health Records

To follow-up on the project, Annie Anton has written a good overview of the privacy concerns associated with Microsoft's HealthVault policies.

Illegally Accessing your EMR?

A recent story in Wyoming - several employees recntly broke federal privacy law by accessing their OWN records.

Read more on the story here.

"Anonymous" DNA used for Ancestry Tracing

Researchers at RPI are using de-identified DNA, with no additional family history to predict ancestral heritage. It basically uses a combination of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a classification algorithm (apologies, but I haven't taken the time to look into the algorithm yet).

(Article here)