A substantial number of Americans are worried about the security of their medical information.
Nearly 1 in 8 people have withheld information about themselves from a healthcare provider due to concerns about security and privacy, according to a study published online by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Read more »
Patients do care about what becomes of their health information after it's used for their treatment, and they care more about what it's used for than who's using it.
That's according to a survey report published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association summarizing research aimed to measure patient preferences about sharing their electronic health information for so-called “secondary uses.”
Read more »
Craig Michael Lie Njie spent a chunk of his life developing an online privacy shield, but when he tried to get his own mother to use it, she wouldn't click on the button. Why?
According to Lie Njie, loading up his software would have meant his mother acknowledging cyber-insecurity as real. Most Americans don't want to know.
Read more »
Madigan
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has asked a number of popular online healthcare websites and healthcare services providers to be more transparent about their privacy policies and how they use their customers' personal information.
Madigan said she sent letters to executives at WebMD.com, weightwatchers.com, drugs.com, menshealth.com, mayoclinic.com, about.com, health.com and mercola.com, asking them to disclose how much users' health information they capture, how they store it and whether they share it with outside companies.
Read more »
Be careful what you search for.
Dr. Marco Huesch, writing in the online letters section of the July 8 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, reports on a privacy experiment he ran recently on 20 popular healthcare websites.
Read more »
