EHIP

'Disastrous' £11.4bn NHS IT programme to be abandoned

Ministers will today say the ill-fated £11.4 billion National Programme for IT, set up in 2002, is to be "urgently dismantled" following criticism that it is not value for taxpayers' money.

After an official review, the "one size fits all" project will be replaced by cheaper regional schemes allowing local health trusts and GPs to develop or buy individual computer systems to suit their needs.

The Coalition's Major Projects Authority, established to review Labour's financial commitments to gauge if they provide value for money, found the scheme was not fit to provide services to the NHS, which has to make about £20bn in savings.

It comes after a damning report from a cross-party committee of MPs concluded that the programme had proved "beyond the capacity of the Department of Health to deliver".

Digitising the medical records of the country's 62 million people was the core objective of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, accounting for £7bn of the total estimated cost.

Last month the Public Accounts Committee found that despite billions of pounds already being spent on the scheme, it was unclear what the benefits have been and so ministers should think about whether the rest of the cash could be better spent elsewhere.

Automated Summary from: The Telegraph

The man who stole identities of dead children

THE families of dead children whose identities were stolen by a German con artist, now in a Victorian prison, were not told of the crime by authorities.

The sister of one of the boys said her family was angry and felt the identity theft was a terrible slur on the memory of a child.

The little brother she never knew was one of the children whose identity was stolen by travelling conman Robert Hauke.

Hauke scoured cemeteries in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, stealing from headstones a series of identities that he could mask as his own.

He then used the names of the children to falsely claim Newstart and education allowances from Centrelink.

"It's disturbing to think someone would go to a gravesite and pick a name out for personal gain," Mr Di Labio said.

Mr Di Labio said his family was not made aware of Hauke's crime and was disappointed the authorities hadn't informed them.

 

Automated Summary from: The Herald Sun

Medicine's mobile mania raises the threat level, DHS warns

Health care facilities are increasingly going wireless, employing smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices to diagnose and treat patients and make medical records easy to get to.

It's a trend that's not going to slow down, either.

In fact, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected May 17 to call for freeing up wireless spectrum to boost another wireless tool, "mobile body area networks," which allow doctors to remotely monitor patients through the use of sensors and wireless transmissions.

But all that mobile connectivity, along with an array of network-connected devices, comes with risks, particularly since the medical industry isn't known to be strong on security, as a recent report from the Homeland Security Department points out.

The report, “Attack Surface: Healthcare and Public Health Sector,” from DHS’ National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center notes that mobile and network-attached devices are in many ways optimal tools for health care, but that they also introduce a host or potential threats.

Along with specific examples, the report lays out the same threats any smart phone, tablet or USB device faces, ranging from physical loss of the device to loss of sensitive information via spear-phishing attacks.

Automated Summary from: GCN.com

Delete Data To Delete Risk

Earlier this month, a Missouri state senator led a filibuster to block the vote on the creation of a new prescription-tracking database within the state -- on the grounds that should a breach occur to expose this database, it would expose embarrassing information about citizens.

This event offers good evidence that awareness is growing both in the public and private sector that one of the best ways to protect sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) from a breach is to eliminate its existence.

As Dean Gonsowski, senior eDiscovery counsel for Symantec, explains, there's a yin and yang of retaining lots of data.

"Yeah, that information may be useful, but there's also a latent information risk associated with having it," says Gonsowski, explaining that the three biggest risks include risk of data breaches, risk of compliance issues if the data isn't kept according to regulatory demands, and risk of added litigation cost when it comes time to sift through data to find specific information a judge may ask for.

All of those risks increase as the volume of retained data within an organization mounts.

Unfortunately, with the cheap cost of storage these days, all too many organizations are allowing that volume of data to grow unchecked without enough consideration of how much data they should keep and how long they should keep it.

The problem is that these policies may not be written with enough specificity to make a difference in reducing the volume of PII kept by the organization.

According to Cal Slemp, managing director and head of Protiviti's IT security and privacy practice, that understanding of what makes data sensitive is a crucial part of managing information throughout the life cycle, particularly when it comes to destruction of data.

"It is our view that data with different sensitivity needs to be treated differently from an information security perspective.”

Automated Summary from: DarkReading.com

Data-Mining in Doctor's Office Helps Solve Medical Mysteries

When hospitals turn to Microsoft Corp., it's no longer just for the latest office software.

In one instance, a hospital in Washington, D.C., asked Microsoft to examine its medical records to determine why certain patients were getting sick soon after being discharged.

The company crunched the data from MedStar Washington Hospital Center and found something surprising: Patients who stayed in the same room had come down with the same infection.

As hospitals digitize patient records and amass huge amounts of data, many are relying on companies such as Microsoft, SAS Institute Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp., whose data-mining technologies can help them detect patterns and improve medical care.

The use of data-mining technology has already led to some measurable improvements in patient care.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital has reduced the rate of potentially fatal blood clotting in patients by using analytics software, Dr. Nicholas Morrissey, a surgeon involved in the effort, said in an interview.

Two of the strongest predictors of whether a patient would be rehospitalized were lack of an emotional support network and the presence of a bulging jugular vein -- two things hospital staff can easily look for when admitting patients.

Besides improving patient care, hospitals' use of analytics software can make them eligible for millions of dollars in government funding if they can demonstrate "meaningful use" of their computer systems.

Federal law prohibits medical providers from disclosing certain health information without patient consent, but there is an exemption for activities that fall under "quality improvement," said Susan McAndrew, deputy director for health information privacy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights.

Automated Summary from: BloombergBusinessweek

Health Exchanges' Sharing of Patient Data Heightens Privacy Concerns

Victor Hand, a semi-retired railway manager in Maine, grew so alarmed when he learned that his state was building a database to store all residents' medical files that he rushed to the hospital to try to opt out.

Maine was one of the first states to set up a health information exchange -- a computer network connecting disparate medical practices, from rural, one-physician outposts to urban mega-hospitals -- to help doctors share patient files with the click of a mouse.

Fueled by $548 million in federal grants as part of the Obama administration's health-care overhaul, the exchanges represent a radical change in how patient records are handled and used in treatment, Bloomberg.com reports.

In some cases, they include data without patients' consent, and privacy advocates fret that some exchanges may lose or even sell personal information.

A gap in federal law lets states set their own rules about whether to tell patients their medical data are being shared with an exchange and whether to let people opt out.

The result: Many exchanges in the U.S. give patients no choice about such matters, according to the EHealth Initiative, a nonprofit organization that researches health-care technology.

The databases have won support from care providers such as the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital and Mayo Clinic.

The exchanges may also be a boon for big insurance companies that provide the underlying technology, a market expected to grow to almost $800 million this year, according to Chilmark Research, which covers health-care technology.

While concerns over privacy have scuttled formal plans for a national exchange, the federal government is pushing for standards that will let exchanges in different states communicate with each other.

The idea is to mimic cell phone networks, letting patients roam between providers and have electronic medical records follow, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which oversees the efforts.

The exchanges have clear benefits, such as letting emergency room doctors look up an unconscious patient's medication history, lab results or record of previous problems.

Joy Pritts, chief privacy officer for the Office of the National Coordinator, said government officials are taking steps to ensure that patients have a say over inclusion and updating laws to impose privacy and security requirements on exchanges.

Another concern is that exchanges with shaky finances could be tempted to sell data to marketers, which is permitted if the information is exchanged in an anonymous form.

A recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union found "significant flaws" in that state's exchanges, which cover nearly 3 million people.

Automated Summary from: BloombergBusinessweek

How private are your medical records? Edmonton family says not private enough

EDMONTON - Could strangers have access to all your electronic health records with just a click of a mouse?

A family at the centre of a privacy commissioner investigation tells Global News that because of a flaw in the system, it's happened to them, and they are now calling on the province to better protect Albertans' privacy so that it doesn't happen to others.

Right now, medical personnel can access the records of any Albertan through a province-wide database called Netcare.

David Neibach became suspicious that his records were being looked at without authorization during his divorce proceedings, when his ex-wife's lawyer asked about his medical history.

David's mother Sabine Niebach also felt very invaded. "I have issues I don't discuss with my husband and not with my kids, and a person that has nothing to do with me is able to go there."

Niebach said Alberta Health Services called it "a singular unfortunate event," which he disagrees with.

Covenant Health and Alberta Health and Wellness both refused to comment because the Niebach family is pursuing the matter in court.

Automated Summary from: Global TV Edmonton

Seven fired after 'privacy breach' at Ontario hospital

PETERBOROUGH, Ont. — A Peterborough, Ont., hospital says it has fired seven employees over a privacy breach involving patient information.

Officials at the Peterborough Regional Health Centre say the incident relates to a number of confidential medical records.

The hospital's vice-president, Jane Parr, says hospital officials are taking steps to prevent any future breaches.

Automated Summary from: CTV.ca

Facebook Users Share and 'Like' Too Much, Report Says

Facebook has nearly 1 billion users, but a good chunk of them are clueless when it comes to using the social network safely, a new study conducted by Consumer Reports has found.

Consumer Reports projected its findings after questioning Facebook, security experts, privacy lawyers, app developers, and victims of security and privacy abuse as well as surveying 2002 online households, including 1340 that use Facebook.

Nearly 13 million users have never set or don't know about the social network's privacy tools. And more than a quarter of users have shared their wall posts with an audience broader than their friends.

"It is very likely that no government or corporation has ever managed to gather such a huge amount of personal and often highly sensitive data," said Max Schrems, an Austrian law student who retrieved 1222 pages worth of his personal information last year from Facebook. Among them he found wall posts, messages, e-mail addresses, and friend names that he had previously deleted from his account.

The Consumer Reports findings agree with other studies recently conducted. For example, according to the digital branding firm Siegel+Gale, even after reading privacy policies most users of Facebook and Google still don't understand how the websites handle their information and how other Web users can discover it.

Automated Summary from: PCWorld.com

B.C. health care on the cutting edge of Big Data

If all the bits and bytes of data created last year were put on CDs, the stack would stretch from the Earth to the moon and back --- and then some.

So much data are being created --- from our health records, those sensors in our smartphones and Nike sneakers, not to mention Facebook and YouTube accounts --- it is now described with a new word, the zettabyte.

How we use our tsunami of data, analyze the data and protect the privacy of citizens is one of the biggest public policy, business and scientific issues facing us today.

Thanks to the foresight of provincial governments of all stripes going back more than three decades, B.C. has been digitizing our health records for more than a generation.

It is one of the best Big Data health care bases in the world, coveted by health care researchers in both the public and private sectors, including the pharmaceutical companies that need to figure out how their drugs are doing outside the lab.

This data can lead us to insights into how a drug has worked over a vast population, enabling researchers to determine which doses are most effective, which are wrong-headed or perhaps dangerous.

Yet almost every B.C. researcher you talk to will lament British Columbia is not using its public health data resource to the degree it should be. In part the answer is privacy. Many believe Big Data can easily morph into Big Brother if privacy safeguards are not in place.

Health researchers will tell you technologies and laws exist to ensure individual data are stripped off all data used for research, guaranteeing privacy.

In the zettabyte world, this province has a head start which it and Canada can’t afford to squander.

Automated Summary from: The Vancouver Sun