On 2/26/03 11:30, "Christopher Hummert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This is just my opinion on why it happened. From what I understand a few > bad apples had some mishaps with patient information, the media gets a > hold of this, blows it out of proportion, Blows what out of proportion? Insufficient safeguards on patient data? What would be a significant reaction to the unauthorized sharing of thousands of medical records? Is "oops, we're terribly sorry" a sufficient level of accountability for such actions? Shouldn't others in the medical industry have risen up saying, "we've spent millions of dollars putting safeguards in place to protect patient privacy and this rogue entity needs to be punished severely"? But they didn't.. I wonder why. Perhaps because none of them were really doing anything to protect this data. > a few rep and senators decided > to do something about this, because now it's been blown into this > massive problem that threatens to destroy our society as we know it. It's this level of sarcasm and complete lack of understanding of why the public is concerned about their information being shared inappropriately which lead to regulations being put in place. > Thus HIPPA was born. It's HIPAA. >The safeguards were already in place, the industry > was doing a good job creating solutions to protect patient data, but a > few people screwed it up. Really? If the safeguards were in place then why are there companies making tons of cash off of implementing solutions to ensure HIPAA compliance? HIPAA compliance is one of the largest sources of IT spending anywhere at the moment. I fail to see how that can be if the safeguards are already in place. > Even with HIPPA in place those same people will be out there to screw > things up, they'll find one way or another, and thus something like > HIPPA v2 will happen, with the cycle continuing on and on. And this is a bad thing why? > With the insurance side of this, protection of patient information is > extremely important. Since if you screw up once and someone out there > finds out about, there are a ton of other agents out there that will be > more then happy to take that account away from you. Well, first of all.. There's the all important "if" someone finds out. It's certainly possible that there are hundreds (nay thousands, nay tens of thousands) of incidents which have occurred which the public will never find out about. The reality is that disclosure of patient data among the largest insurers is unlikely to result in to large of a change in the status quo. Look at all the bad press Ford took for the Pinto in the 70's, yet they are still going strong. Why should we expect that a large insurer would suffer a dissimilar fate? > Besides technology the bigger problem is the social side of patient data > protection. Look at Kevin Metnick(spelling?), he used peoples trust in > other people, against them to get the information that he wanted. What's > going to stop someone from doing this? That's the biggest problem that > being faced today. Social engineering is a problem. That it is the biggest problem is a debatable point. _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
