FTC Releases Report: "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers"

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Colin J. Zick

 

Earlier today, the FTC released a preliminary staff report entitled, "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change:  A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers."  The report is over 100 pages long and suggests that changes need to be made regarding consumer privacy, stating:

Industry must do better. For every business, privacy should be a basic consideration –
similar to keeping track of costs and revenues, or strategic planning. To further this goal, this report proposes a normative framework for how companies should protect consumers’ privacy.  

We'll have our more detailed thoughts on this document posted shortly.

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Lessons from the VA: what you can learn from someone else's problems

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Colin J. Zick

For all their problems, Veterans Affairs medical centers across the country are at the vanguard of the implementation of electronic health records. As such, there is a lot to learn from the problems that the VA system has experienced in this area. According to an article in the March 4, 2009 Journal of the American Medical Association, the problems experienced by the VA include mixed-up patient names and missing medication orders. These types of problems are probably endemic in any EHR system.  (This very point was made by Drs. Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband in their March 12, 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed.) Given these built-in weaknesses, frequent auditing of records, with strong and persistent audit trails, are a vital component to any EHR system.  Also, communications between all levels of workers in the care setting are important, to provide similar feedback.  The VA has adopted these mechanisms as part of its EHR systems. VA health care workers are encouraged to report problems with the electronic medical record systems, and those reports are closely monitored. Ironically, this may be why we hear so much about the VA’s issues – they are finding problems that others have in their data systems, but do not yet know about.

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