The Private Social Network for healthcare

In his post on the Pathcare blog, I trust you to keep this private, Danny Lieberman talked about the roles that trust, security and privacy play in online healthcare interactions. In this post, Danny talks about healthcare privacy challenges in social networks and describes how to implement a private social network for healthcare without government privacy […]

How to keep secrets in healthcare online

The roles of trust, security and privacy in healthcare.  If President Obama had told his psychiatrist he was gay, you can bet that it would be on Facebook in 5′. So much for privacy. pri·va·cy/ˈprīvəsē/ Noun: The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people. The state of being […]

How to secure patient data in a healthcare organization

If you are a HIPAA covered entity or a business associate vendor to a HIPAA covered entity the question of HIPAA – the question of securing patient data is central to your business.  If you are a big organization, you probably don’t need my advice – since you have a lot of money to spend […]

Anatonme – a hand held device for improving patient-doctor communications

From a recent article in Healthcare Global. Studies suggest that 30-50 percent of patients are likely to give up treatments early.  Microsoft Research has developed an innovative, hand-held medical device called Anatonme to help patients understand their issue and complete their treatment plan more often. We’ve been doing research and development into private, controlled social […]

Problems in current Electronic Health Record systems

Software Associates specializes in helping medical device and healthcare technology vendors achieve HIPAA compliance and improve the data and software security of their products in hospital and mobile environments. As I noted here and here, the security and compliance industry is no different from other industries in having fashion and trends.  Two years ago, PHR (Personal […]

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 […]

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 […]

Research data integrity

I usually write about best practices and practical tools to prevent data theft, data loss and data leakage – since our professional services focus on data security in Central and Eastern Europe. Data security is, I guess a sub-specialty of security and compliance. Security is chartered with ensuring the survival of a business and protecting […]