I was recently speaking with a friend on the phone, and she said, “I just had the most embarrassing thing happen! I had one of my Facebook friends send me a text teasing me about reading a rather sleazy article on TMZ. I did not know what she was talking about! So, I went to my Facebook page, and sure enough, down the timeline there was an article I had only briefly gone to the previous day after clicking a headline about moms on Google news and landed on a page; I quickly got off of when I saw it. I was so embarrassed to see that my brief visit to the page had been posted on my Facebook page! I don’t even go to TMZ on purpose, why is Facebook suddenly tattling on me when it accidentally went there?” (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘audit’
Big Brother Likes Big Data – Balancing Privacy with Innovation
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012My 12-year-old son said to me yesterday after getting home from school, “Hey, Mommy, did you know that Wal-Mart can tell when you’re pregnant? And so can Target! Even before anyone else knows! They got a girl in trouble when they sent her dad coupons for baby stuff and congratulated her!”
Me, “That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? Companies are able to discover things like that about people more than ever before through analyzing what is called ‘Big Data’.”
Son, “That’s really creepy. I think you should (more…)
Back to the Future Security Basics: Security through Obscurity Still Does Not Work
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012Last week I provided Howard Anderson at HealthInfosecurity.com with some of my thoughts about the recent Utah Department of Health breach of the files of 900,000 individuals, and counting. He included some of my thoughts in his blog post, along with thoughts from others. I wanted to provide my full reply here, along with some expanded thoughts.
As background, for those of you who may not have heard of this hack yet, in a nutshell: (more…)
Auditing Patient Records Survey Results
Saturday, September 10th, 2011There are no specific requirements that the Department of Health and Human Services provide with regards to how often to perform patient records audits (understandably so, since it should be based upon an organization’s own risk environment), and so many healthcare providers wonder what others are doing, or what is “standard” practice. So, to help determine this, from mid- to late-August (two weeks) I posted a very short, completely unscientific, survey specifically to get a feel for what some other hospitals and clinics are doing with regard to auditing patient records access and disclosures, as required by HIPAA. Here are the results… (more…)
