From Sharing Music to Sharing Medical Records

Scientific American gets it. Do you? View story here.

Dr. Eric Johnson's latest study is out. Our job is to inform the public and Congress, who are continually being falsely reassured that health IT systems are secure and private by spinmeisters for the insurance, hospital, drug, Health IT, and health data mining industries.

Industry's blatant false promises of security and privacy are something we have been urging FTC to investigate (as false and deceptive trade practices) and the new Administration should understand to ensure that the stimulus funds are not spent on primitive health technologies with abysmal security and no consumer control over PHI. We need 'smart' health IT, 'smart' human processes, and we need the health care industry to step up and use them, so we have trusted electronic systems and don’t waste the stimulus billions.

See Dr. Johnson's paper here.

The research examined samples of health-care data disclosures and search activity in peer-to-peer file sharing networks of the top 10 publicly traded health care firms (using Fortune Magazine's list) over a two-week period. More than 500 hospitals were represented in the 10 organizations. 3,328 files were collected for the study.

•"data losses in the healthcare sector continue at a dizzying pace"
•"Far worse than losing a laptop or storage device with patient data (Robenstein 2008), inadvertent disclosures on P2P networks allow many criminals access to the information, each with different levels of sophistication and ability to exploit the information."
•"Many of the documents were leaked by patients themselves. For example we found several patient-generated spreadsheets containing details of medical treatments and costs--likely for tax purposes."
•"we found a hospital-generated spreadsheet of personally identifiable information on recently-hired employees including social security numbers, contact information, job category, etc"
•"For a hospital system, we found two spreadsheet data bases that contained detailed information on over 20,000 patients including socials security numbers, contact information, and insurance information."
•"For a mental health center, we found patient psychiatric evaluations."

Where is the mainstream and trade journal reporting on this???