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Woman Loses Health Insurance Due to Facebook

Imagine a world you live in where every insurance offering is accompanied by a creepy set of Big Brother-like ongoing investigations into your life. Everything will be used as evidence against you. Yes, even your Facebook profile. That world is here. Well, not right...

MITSS: Much-needed support after medical errors

Ten years ago this week, 11/18/99, Linda Kenney was scheduled for ankle replacement surgery. She woke up three days later in the ICU. Her chest had been cut open. She was in the hospital ten days. And nobody talked about what had happened. What had happened is that...

A quote I won’t soon forget

Marcia Angell MD is a well-known, respected physician, long-time editor of NEJM. So it was a bit of a shock today when Amy Romano, blogger for Lamaze International, sent me this quote: It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is...

Social media and healthcare: hospitals lead

A signal moment has happened: When a major business authority with no history in healthcare speaks up about a shift in the wind, it’s worth noting. And this time it’s a great sign for participatory medicine, because the news is that hospitals are engaging...

“HIPAA is SO 1996”

That’s a direct quote from Paul Tang, of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, at last week’s meeting of the Health IT Policy committee, of which he is vice chair. Dr. Tang was riffing on an e-Patient Dave quote, which I read during my testimony: I want...

Why Electronic Medical Records Still Leak

I hear it time and time again in the e-health industry: “If only we had everyone on an electronic medical record, all of our security and privacy issues would be solved!” Really? Perhaps I should introduce you to a little something psychologists like to...

Dx: Revolting.   Rx: Revolt.

Tuesday night, endorsement #906 on HealthDataRights.org came from a Judy Beckman, who says: “I agree all the way I cannot get MY records unless I pay for MY records $1.00 per page WHY WHY these are MINE???????????” Indeed, why? Whose data is it, anyway? This spring...

Imagine someone had been managing your data: next anecdote

Next anecdote about poorly managed medical data: Amen! Just had an incident where my SS# was attached to a different patient’s name in the electronic med record. And the health facility will not tell me where the error occured, or how long someone else’s name was...

e-Patients Demand: Put An End To
Data-Hugging Disorder

“Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them” This quote from Hans Rosling is part of a speech where he presented the following: Database-hugging disorder (Dbhd): A...

For Want of a Surge Protector…

It seems somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible for this to happen in this day and age, but Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis had to turn away patients when a power surge took down its electronic medical records system. Yes, that’s right — our...

PLEASE, No More Magical Thinking in HIT!

Magical thinking: the ability to draw conclusions that are based on a person’s desire for what reality should be, not necessarily upon what reality actually is. Cargo Cult HIT:  Concepts in HIT that follow all the apparent precepts and forms of evidence-based...

Applying Participatory Principles to EHRs/PHRs

Neither health professionals nor patients can do it alone. Let’s make no mistake: We are here to participate and to help! e-Patient Dave original story of the health data transfer from his hospital EHR to Google Health PHR is remarkable in many ways and shows...

Completing my list of billing code errors

This post will complete (I hope!) the list of errors that I discovered in the billing data that forms part of my medical records. The original post is here. As I said in the the previous post, “Let me make clear, I personally have only one agenda: to empower, equip...

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