When there are so many moving parts, just how secure is patient data?
Friday, August 13, 2010 at 9:36:00 AM
 Four Massachusetts community hospitals are investigating how thousands of patient health records, some containing Social Security numbers and sensitive medical diagnoses, ended up in a pile at a public dump.
The unshredded records included pathology reports with patients’ names, addresses, and results of breast, bone, and skin cancer tests, as well as the results of lab work following miscarriages. By law, medical records and documents containing personal identifying information must be disposed of in a way that protects privacy, and leaving them at a dump is probably illegal, privacy lawyers and hospital officials said. Violators face steep fines.
A Globe photographer discovered the records July 26 when he was dumping his trash at the Georgetown Transfer Station. When he got out of his car, he said, he saw a huge pile of paper about 20 feet wide by 20 feet long. Upset that the paper wasn’t being recycled, he looked more closely.
See tne entire article at Boston.com
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Monday, May 17, 2010 at 12:00:00 AM
As Massachusetts gets ready to deploy federal and state funds to set up a health information exchange (HIE) to link electronic medical records across the state, companies are clamoring to be a part of the action.
“There is definitely a gold rush out there,” said Marshall Votta, director of government affairs at Cambridge-based NaviNet Inc. The company, which is best-known for providing billing and administrative services, is expanding to add clinical data exchange to its arsenal. The company has offered its Web portal free to each of the 50 states, and its business model relies on payment from insurers per transaction, not providers...
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...Massachusetts was awarded $11.5 million by the federal government to implement an HIE, but has not received the funds as of yet. The state must first file a completed plan for the HIE and officials at the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) said that they expect to issue RFPs to potential vendors in 2011. The state also has $12 million in state funds that were part of an original appropriation of $25 million two years ago. Budget cuts reduced that figure to $15 million, and so far $3 million has been spent to set up the administrative entity charged with establishing the statewide HIE, called the Massachusetts e-Health Institute. The state has until now been part of a p...
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Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 12:00:00 AM
Albert Gonzalez, the man accused of hacking into major retailers such as TJX Cos., Hannaford Brothers Co. Inc. and 7-Eleven plead guilty today in Boston district court. It's been a long-road for him to come to justice, and it makes us think about how things would be different had that "major" hack into TJX's servers not happened. How long would it have taken for something like PCI compliance to happen?
That singular event was the major catalyst behind PCI compliance and the need to secure data relating to credit cards. In many ways, it was an after-thought before.
From Mass High Tech:
Accused of conspiracy in the hacking attacks on payment systems supporting companies such as retailers TJX Cos., Hannaford Brothers Co. Inc. and 7-Eleven, Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami, today pleaded guilty to the final charges against him in U.S. District Court in Boston.
Federal prosecutors said that Gonzalez, who allegedly controlled servers that gained access to the corporate servers and then gave information to hackers that would use malware to launch attacks on the victims, pleaded guilty to two cou...
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 12:00:00 AM
I saw this incredible story about an innovative way to recover lost data. If your hard drive fails, put it in a freezer for an hour.
WHAT???!!!
Seems it works...
See the entire story at Infoworld.com.
...
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Transferring data between MS Access and Outlook
Wednesday, July 08, 2009 at 10:00:00 AM
 Database Journal recently published a series of articles/how-to's on how to extract data from Microsoft Outlook and send that data into a Microsoft Access database (as well as the reverse).
From Database Journal:
- Working With Outlook from Access
- From Access to Outlook
The steps do require some programming skills, but I've tried these steps and they work quite well. Could be useful if you want to connect your Outlook Inbox with a custom-made CRM system, or if you wanted Outlook to be automatically updated with calendar or contact items from a database....
NOTE: Article text has been summarized. Click here for the entire post.
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