Is Health Data Privacy On Its Way Out?

As healthcare providers gradually improve their HIPAA data security and privacy compliance, one might think that the odds of a breach occurring are getting lower. Maybe that’s true within the provider organizations themselves, but there are forces outside of healthcare which will make it impossible to protect personal data in the future, according to a post on Axoblog. The piece argues that the notion of data privacy is dying. “To the extent that emails and other communications meant for designated recipients are analyzed, scraped aggregated and stored it is the opinion of this author that the protection of PHI is illusory,” the article says. As the piece correctly notes, unscrupulous companies and can learn a great deal about consumers by analyzing their Internet search history. And of course, there are social media stalkers like Facebook, which monitors Internet activity even when the subscriber is logged off. (It’s hard to believe that other Internet companies aren’t doing the same thing in a less public manner.) By using a rich source like Facebook user data and aggregating it with information from other social media networks, outsiders can pull together a personal profile of users. This database could easily expose medical information that should be protected under HIPAA and HITECH. And it’s not just Facebook data that is of concern. By buying available data from all the social media networks, then matching that data with commercial databases offering detail...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR EMR Security Health Care Healthcare Healthcare Business HealthCare IT HIPAA HITECH Social Networking Health Consumer Health Data Data Aggregators Facebook Health Data Source Type: blogs