Healthcare data interoperability pain
Data without interoperability = pain. What is happening in the US healthcare space is fascinating as stimulus funds (or what they call in the Middle East – “baksheesh”) are being paid to doctors to acquire an Electronic Health Records system that has “meaningful use”. The term “meaningful use” is vaguely defined in the stimulus bill […]
Customer convenience or customer privacy
This is a presentation I gave at the UPU (Universal Postal Union) EPSG (Electronic Products and Services working Group) working meeting in Bern on Feb 20, 2007. About 25 people from 20 countries were present and it was a great experience for me to hear how Postal operations see themselves and what they do in […]
Rising the level of trust associated with identity in online transactions
Obama’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace In April President Obama signed the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) which charts a course for the public and private sectors to collaborate on raising the level of trust associated with identity in online transactions. NSTIC focuses on upgrading outdated password-based authentication systems and […]
Threats on personal health information
A recent HIPAA violation in Canada where an imaging technician accessed the medical records of her ex-husband’s girlfriend comes as no surprise to me. Data leakage of ePHI in hospitals is rampant simply because a) there is a lot of it floating around and b) because of human nature. Humans being naturally curious, sometimes vindictive and always […]
Controlled private networking
This evening I was added to a FB Group – apparently – you don’t have to agree to be joined in. FB Groups is a way to organize your contacts and get better control over your social networking. It looks pretty cool to me but the New York Times suggests that Facebook groups may engender even more […]
Controlled social networking
I saw a post recently on Controlled social networking for student collaboration. One of the comments lamented not having the head count to install technology to control Facebook access by students. Frankly – as a data security and compliance consultant who does a lot of work with corporates in social networking (both on the application side […]
Are you still using Excel for risk assessment?
There is a school of thought that says that you can take any complex problem and break it down like swiss cheese. Risk assessment data collection and analysis with Excel is one of those problems that can’t be swiss-cheesed. A collection of brittle, unwieldy, two dimensional worksheets is a really bad way of doing multi-dimensional […]
What price privacy?
Dr. David Gurevich in an interview with the Israeli business daily Globes predicts that real time death will be the next development in reality programming. Once the domain of science fiction and fantasy – Dr. Gurevich believes that the online death scenario is an inevitable development in the loss of privacy and wave of voyeurism […]
Secure collaboration, agile collaboration
One of the biggest challenges in global multi-center clinical trials (after enrollment of patients) is collaboration between multi-center clinical trial teams: CRAs, investigators, regulatory, marketing, manufacturing, market research, data managers, statisticians and site administrators. In a complex global environment, pharma do not have control of computer platforms that local sites use – yet there is […]
Data security and compliance – Best practices
Compliance is about enforcing business process – for example, PCI DSS is about getting the transaction authorized without getting the data stolen. SOX is about sufficiency of internal controls for financial reporting and HIPAA is about being able to disclose PHI to patients without leaks to unauthorized parties. So where and how does DLP fit into the compliance […]
