EHIP

Data-Mining Firms Seek To Block Vermont Rx Data Marketing Law

Attorney Thomas Julin -- who was representing IMS Health, Verispan and Source Healthcare Analytics -- asked a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to block implementation of the law until the court decided whether to uphold a lower court ruling in favor of the state.

Julin argued that the information gathered by the data-mining firms is noncommercial speech protected by the First Amendment.

However, Vermont Assistant Attorney General Bridget Asay said no substantial First Amendment issues were at stake and called the data-mining firms' work a "covert marketing tool."

Asay said that the Vermont Prescription Confidentiality Law regulates commercial marketing of health data to promote public health, medical privacy and to contain health care costs. She added that the state found that data marketed by the companies led to higher health care costs and contributed to inappropriate prescribing decisions.

However, Julin said that the state cannot prove that the law will reduce health care costs.

Automated summary from: iHealth Beat

Security on stolen laptops was inadequate: privacy commissioner

Alberta's privacy commissioner is perplexed by news that two laptops containing personal patient information were stolen from a lab at the University of Alberta Hospital.

What's surprising is the information wasn't encrypted, said commissioner Frank Work on Wednesday.

The laptops were taken after a break-in at the Provincial Lab Information Technology room. The laptops contained names, birth dates, personal health numbers and lab reports for communicable and reportable diseases on more than 300,000 people.

While Alberta Health Services did have layers of protection on those laptops, the final layer simply wasn't there, Work said.

"The standard in Alberta… is encryption…. This is highly sensitive information and an issue of public trust," the commissioner said. "How can the public have faith in public bodies if they can't provide security for personal information?"

Automated summary from: CBC News

Posting online can be invasion of privacy, Appeals Court rules

A Twin Cities case of medical information put on MySpace has been sent back to district court to reconsider plaintiff's claims.

The ruling stemmed from a suit by a Twin Cities woman whose diagnosis of having a sexually transmitted disease showed up in 2006 on a MySpace social networking page that referred to the woman as "Rotten Candy," displayed her picture, and said she cheated on her husband and was addicted to plastic surgery.

The woman alleged that after she was found to have the disease at Fairview Cedar Ridge Clinic in Apple Valley, a medical assistant there read her file and conveyed the information to mutual relatives, including one who may have created the MySpace page, which was taken down a couple of days after its discovery.

The clinic eventually fired the employee for violating policy by accessing the patient's records, and the patient sued Fairview Clinics, the former employee and two other women who allegedly helped spread the information.

A district court ruled in favor of the defendants on several grounds -- including that she hadn't produced enough evidence, that the clinic couldn't be held liable for the unauthorized act of its employee, and the posting on MySpace didn't constitute "publicity" under the law.

But a three-judge Court of Appeals panel ruled that the MySpace posting did constitute publicity. What matters, the court said, isn't how many people saw the posting, but rather whether it was posted in a medium that conveys information directly to the public.

Automated summary from: StarTribune

Prescription drug fight goes before appeals court

So-called data-mining companies that collect information about the drugs doctors prescribe asked an appeals court Tuesday to stop Vermont from enacting a law restricting their work.

Attorney Thomas Julin told a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that it would violate the First Amendment rights of the companies if the law is enacted on July 1.

He asked the appeals court to block implementation of the law until it decides whether to uphold a lower court ruling that concluded the law did not violate the Constitution.

Both sides were expected to submit written arguments in the wider appeal case within two months.

Julin, representing IMS Health Inc. (RX - news - people), Verispan LLC and Source Healthcare Analytics Inc., told the judges that information gathered by the companies is noncommercial speech protected by the First Amendment.

The companies gather electronic information on drugs ordered by doctors for their patients and sell that information to pharmaceutical companies.

In court papers, they said they also publish unique reports - "a form of specialized news reporting" - showing which doctors prescribe which medications most frequently.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston has already upheld the New Hampshire law, a ruling that the companies have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review.

Automated summary from: Forbes Magazine

Plans for e-Health raise huge threats to privacy for Canadians

Canadians value the right to choose who they share intimate health information with. This right is now under threat. "E-Health" is coming.

E-Health will create a giant system of electronic health records that will eventually be accessible across the entire country. These government repositories of citizens' health information are promoted as likely to make health care safer, cheaper and more efficient.

But there's little evidence to support those claims.

Governments have a terrible track record of safeguarding information on a single laptop, let alone huge concentrations of valuable, highly sensitive data that will attract sophisticated hackers and criminals and be available through thousands of access points.

We are told that Canadians support e-health and yet only 33 per cent of Canadians find it very or somewhat acceptable to have some (core) clinical data from a patient record stored and managed by local regional health authorities or agencies.

A proper e-Health system must be built on informed consent, and anyone who participates must be able to decide for themselves what information gets shared with whom.

Automated summary from: The Vancouver Sun

Privacy breaches in government databanks concerns advocates

Jon Schubert says he was as shocked as anyone when he learned a lawyer working for the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia used the Crown corporation's database to check claims histories of prospective jurors in a lawsuit against the public auto insurer.

The court case was suspended, the contracted lawyer fired and a review undertaken. It has turned up two more cases where different corporation staff gave claims information to lawyers screening jurors.

The incidents raise the question: just what safeguards are there to protect citizens from unauthorized use of large government and quasi-government databases containing people's personal information?

"These are pressing questions, particularly as we move increasingly within government and the private sector for that matter to the use of electronic information systems," says David Loukidelis, B.C.'s privacy commissioner.

Automated summary from: Yahoo! News

Medical privacy violator gets 1 year

A 22-year-old woman who had a part in the posting of an HIV victim's medical records on the Internet was sentenced to a year in prison yesterday.

Rhonda Wong-Fernandez accessed the records while working at Straub Clinic and Hospital and gave the material to the victim's sister-in-law, Circuit Judge Randal Lee said in passing sentence.

The defendant's lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Alan Komogome, asked Lee for a sentence of probation, and Deputy Prosecutor Christopher Van Marter asked the judge to send Wong-Fernandez to jail for 30 days, followed by probation.

But Lee called the defendant's conduct "egregious" and said the year of imprisonment should serve as a deterrent and a warning to others "that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated."

Automated summary from: Honolulu Advertiser

Google Begins to Make Public Data Searchable

Google just announced its first foray into making public data searchable and viewable in graph form. The company is starting with population and unemployment data from around the US but promises to make far more data sets searchable in the future.

These first data sets come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division, but as Google explains in its announcement there are far more sources of information that could be included.

The coming era of the web is based on data, on drawing patterns and meaning out of a far larger body of data than the human mind alone could ever comprehend. The explosion of data (much of which is now created by the people formerly known as the audience), combined with commodity level storage and processing power, makes technology like what Google began to unveil today possible and important.

Automated summary from: Read Write Web

Patient Money Medical Problems Could Include Identity Theft

The last time federal data on the crime was collected, for a 2007 report, more than 250,000 Americans a year were victims of medical identity theft.

That number has almost certainly increased since then, because of the increased use of electronic medical records systems built without extensive safeguards, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the nonprofit World Privacy Forum and author of a report on medical identity theft.

[Victims] may not know that their medical information has been tampered with for months or even years until, as in Mr. Sharp's case, it shows up in collections on a credit report.
In Mr. Sharp's case, someone got hold of his name and Social Security number and used them to receive emergency medical services, which many hospitals are obliged to provide whether or not a person has insurance.

With medical identity theft, the fraudulent charges can remain unpaid and unresolved for years, permanently damaging your credit rating.

Even when you are able to correct a record, say in your doctor's office, the erroneous information may have been passed on to dozens of other health care providers and insurers.

Automated summary from: New York Times

The Fight Over Drug Data Mining

IMS Health (RX) has built a lucrative niche collecting data on which drugs physicians prescribe, then selling the information to pharmaceutical companies.

The US Supreme Court could shine a spotlight on this topic in the next few weeks if it decides to hear a closely watched case IMS has been fighting in New Hampshire.

The legal drama began in 2006, when New Hampshire passed the Prescription Information Law. It bars the collection of data on what drugs specific doctors prescribe---information drug companies use to fine-tune sales tactics. The law struck right at the heart of IMS's business model, which brought the Norwalk (Conn.) company $311 million in profits on $2.3 billion in sales in 2008. IMS and another data collection company, Verispan (now SDI Health), sued in federal court to challenge the law, which they believe violates their First Amendment rights to free speech.

Governments also purchase consumer data—and that alone could prompt the Supreme Court to hear the case. "If you want to track swine flu, you might want to know who's prescribing Tamiflu," says Jaideep Bajaj, managing director at ZS Associates, a marketing consulting firm in Boston that works with more than 100 pharmaceutical companies. "How do you do that without the data?"

Automated summary from: Business Week