Security

Portable storage media, the scourge of patient privacy

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LA Times: “Altogether, 16,288 patients’ information was taken from the home of a physician whose house was burglarized on Sept. 6, according to the UCLA Health System. The data were on the physician’s external hard drive, officials said. Though the hard drive was encrypted, a piece of paper with the password was nearby and is … Read more

Patients still not diggin’ the idea of an EHR

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EHR outlook: “Patients are still worried about how secure their data will be when stored in an EHR systems, a new study suggests. Xerox Corporation found that of 2,720 poll respondents: 80% were concerned with stolen personal information 64% were concerned with lost, damaged or corrupted files 62% were concerned with the misuse of information” I’m … Read more

Imprivata OneSign Secure Walk-Away Technology

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While at Innovations a couple of weeks back I stumbled across the Imprivata booth at the vendor expo. There were quite a few people gathered around the booth so I obliged my curiosity and squeezed in among the crowd. The Imprivata representatives were giving a demonstration of the company’s OneSign 4.5 application with Walk-Away technology. … Read more

The cloud still slow to gain acceptance in healthcare

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There’s an interesting article at InformationWeek about healthcare and the cloud. The article talks a little bit about the concerns surrounding security in the cloud and what I believe is an undeserved fear of using cloud based services and storage for healthcare information.

In the article a pediatrician that is also director of clinical informatics for Atrius Health is quoted as saying “At the moment I’m not convinced that there’s a secure enough place in the cloud or that the functionality exists for us to do everything that we need to do in the cloud. The cloud allows for a tremendous amount of interconnectivity between computers because it’s using data storage that’s free amongst different networks and I wouldn’t want healthcare information being scattered in a way that I couldn’t protect it appropriately.” I’m not sure I understand the perceived insecurity of the cloud as the existing infrastructure for storing patient information in healthcare is, by design, insecure.

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“What’d I miss?” – Week of January 24th

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As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting. – What’s that? Oh, Avatar is still #1 at the box office. It’s now #2 on the list of top … Read more

Self destructing data for the cloud

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One of the most frequently cited reasons for not utilizing cloud based storage is security. While the self-destructing data solution described below wouldn’t work for healthcare secondary to the need to archive information for long periods of time, it would certainly work for any personal data sent or received over the internet. The ability to put a time-bomb in a document is appealing. Read on to find out more.

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Call to slow down EMR development for better security.

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HIT Consultant Blog: “The law [HITECH, the law gives incentives to healthcare organizations to digitize personal health information before 2020], which also updates parts of HIPAA, gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services until mid-August to define what constitutes an electronic medical record. In Schmidt’s view initial requirements should start with strong authentication and … Read more