I have read up on HIPPA and from the information that I have received HIPPA is supposed to be enforced whether you are alive or deceased. If this is a fact how can doctors or any medical staff speak about your medical condition without your consent? Obviously, he could not have given his consent knowing that he is no longer with us. This brings up huge red flags for me.

For someone who has severe medical conditions. I have always wondered what if I went into a doctors office and knew the person behind the front desk or the nurse. And one night, that person is speaking to someone else in a related medical issue comes up with someone they know. Will that person forget for a second that my medical is confidential?

For the most part, I believe HIPPA is a good program that does try to keep your records confidential. Still, as we have seen with the Michael Jackson situation there a kinks that need to be sorted out.

MCLEAN, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Trust Digital, the leading enterprise mobility management provider, announced on 15 sep that CSL Behring has deployed its mobility management platform to secure the HeliTraxSM system.HeliTraxSM is a web-based application that instantly and easily tracks patient’s medical data that indclude’s patient records, contact information and detailed test data including medical events, an inventory of test medication and a history of medication usage.The HeliTrax application revolutionizes doctor-patient communication by replacing paper collection of data with an electronic process that captures patient information on smartphones and relays it wirelessly to the HeliTrax server. 

Paramedic suspended after posting photos of ATV crash on Internet

After stealing the records, the pair proceeded to commit identity theft, and managed to bill more than $2.8 million dollars in medicare scams.

Isis Machado worked at Weston Clinic and she was the one who printed out social security numbers, birthdays, addresses and other personal info that would allow them to pull this off. Her cousin Fernando Ferrer Jr who owns Advanced Medical Claims then used the information to file tons of fraudulent claims.

I have to question the logic of these two. How on earth did they think to get away with this without anyone knowing. Now they will be paying back $2.8+ million dollars and they will be locked up for a while.

In Ajax Blog, Sreejith introduces us to a few new things. First is Vox a new blogging service from Six Apart that uses WYSIWYG with a taste of web 2.0. After that we learn about Krun.ch and Wishlistr.

Blogging Naked: Scarification and lip plates are shown to be some of the newest and more popular form of “self-expression” in recent years.

Bookadoodle: Nancy Callahan posted more in her series “Getting Published” and this latest edition was part 5.

Boomer 2.0 had posts that pointed out that boomers can still have that second career and another that shows many are not even planning retirement anytime soon.

In Class Action Questions find out about lawsuits involving pyramid scams, hair raising beauty product claims and why State Farm was penalized.

Credit Cardenza: Unfortunately, millions of people are drowning in  credit card debt, have to worry about credit scams and fraud, and let’s not even talk about the international fees.

Dealsneak managed to sneak more than a few deals pass us this summer including, the Samsonite laptop case, a gorgeous leather bench, and a sweet looking Thermaltake Tsunami computer case.

Feed Money discusses the fact the Ebay has jumped on the contextual ad bandwagon as well as blog feeds and a program called RSS To Blog.

If you need to Fix Your Finances one of the first steps is learning how to save your money. After that you can check out Mvelopes to learn all about budgets.

At Games For Money you can find places to play free online gambling games and also learn some card counting tricks and tips.

The High Heels Blogs show us which killer heels are on sale including boots, sandals, slides and mules. Also take a look at some killer wedding heels for this summers nuptials.

A few notable gadgets that were blogged in the HyperGadget blog were the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, and the jumbled and messy looking organizer.

Over at the Medcare Forum, Kathleen Milazzo tells us more about that scary mad cow disease and our medical privacy laws.

Find out just how much house you can afford before you go running off to get that mortgage. And is the housing bubble really ready to blow? All this and more in Mortgage Updates.

At My Secret Side Biz learn how to make a profit, how to get your own powerwash, and simple business and Ebay tips.

On Healthy Living: Sarah White tells us all about a new study that could help with asthma reduction when it comes to do light exercise that involves stead breathing like yoga.

On Movies has a decade of super heroes list that includes recent and unreleased movies. Leafworks reviewed The Omen and we got to see the trailer for the new Ghost Rider movie.

Powersellers Blog: Ebay has done it. They finally reached 200 million members and they are also expanding into new ideas. Also people are fed up with Paypal while crooks are finding more ways to defraud your account.

Seo Updates: Yahoo one of the biggest email services was hit with a worm and Google expanded into real estate but won’t be making a browser, at least not anytime soon.

Get some free exercise tips from The Diet Logs. You will certainly need them if you plan to take a bite of this $100 burger.

Living the Single life? Well take a look at some great break up lines and if your looking to meet people Leafworks posted a great review of club La Rumba.

Thumb Gods: Nintendo is no, no to the name Wii for their new console a game system that is at the end of this long list containing The Evolution of Video Game Consoles.

Las Vegas Revealed that it was ill prepared for a massive disaster, but til then you can still get married and get comp’d in Vegas.

Wander the World, well the State of Colorado with Leafworks. He takes us to the Cherry Blossom Festival, Gothnic in Denver, Old Colorado City, Plaza del Arte Festival in Downtown Denver and Garden of the Gods.

Only recently the Federal Trade Commission had their own breach, which was due to someone stealing a laptop from an employees vehicle. A lot of these problems seem to be happening because employees have laptops and private files with millions of data on hundreds of thousands of people and no one is doing a thing about it.

I really would have thought that companies would take a look at what’s happening and start changing the way information is handled when it comes to employees taking it with them.

I would take a large guess that until some of the information stolen belongs to a celebrity or someone in Congress, not a damn thing is going to be done. If you are one of the people affected I guess they will sing you the tune of too bad, so sad.

The court case involved the Cincinnati Enquirer, which wanted the city to “hand over information regarding building owners who’d been cited for lead paint violations.” On March 17th, the Enquirer won: the Ohio Supreme Court “ruled unanimously that the Cincinnati Health Department was in the wrong when it used HIPAA’s privacy protections as an excuse not to provide the Enquirer with information on lead paint violations.”

Because many states have open records laws, so this outcome could “prove to be a landmark ruling should similar situations emerge in other locales.”

For more details, check out CIO Magazine.

“With the addition of these regulatory modules, Chevron is better positioned to more proactively manage, deploy, and mitigate ongoing compliance efforts for SOX, HIPAA and other global regulatory requirements,” said Jay White, Global Information Protection Architect, Chevron. “Never before have we been able to implement easily and quickly such a comprehensive solution across our widely distributed information assets for compliance with external and internal regulations and security protocols.”

Brabeion Compliance Center is designed to significantly decrease the time and cost of implementing an IT compliance program, while providing unparalleled support for specific government and industry regulations. The solution includes modules for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Healthcare Information Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Federal Information Systems Management Act (FISMA), the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), California SB 1386 and NIST 800-53. Brabeion Software plans to launch additional modules later this year.

Source: Thomas Net

Via Daily Breeze:

All that seems reasonable. HIPAA, for example, allows your doctor to discuss your case with, say, a radiologist if you require an X-ray for an ankle injury. But as things stand now, HIPAA regulations also allow your medical information to be shared by hundreds of thousands of people without your knowledge — health care-related companies such as drug makers, fund-raisers, law practices, marketers and transcription services. And those businesses can, in turn, share your data with their affiliates.

Your information also could be included in health-care research or public-health programs without your knowledge. Such is the case in New York City, where the Department of Health recently launched a program to monitor the blood-test results of more than 500,000 diabetic New Yorkers — a step to help reduce the some 1,900 diabetes-related deaths in the city each year.

I don’t think that most of us realizes what goes on without our knowledge whether it’s money related, or health related when it comes to our “private” information. We don’t know how many hands such info passes through, but we do know that we get lots of junk mail and letters from who knows where and we don’t always know how they got theirs hands on our information.

“Patients own their health data and should control who has access to their personal health records. Privacy violations will exponentially increase if patients cannot limit which health care businesses and government agencies can access our personal health data over an electronic network,” said Deborah C. Peel, MD who is chairman for the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation (PPRF).

Tim Sparapani, Legislative Counsel of American Civil Liberties Union has also said, “The intentions of the proposed health information technology legislation are to improve healthcare, reduce medical errors, and save money, but we believe that those benefits will be realized only if there are ironclad privacy protections. Guaranteeing privacy will generate public acceptance, trust and participation in these networks.”

Critics fear that if people are forced to reveal their medical records over electronic networks that they will be less than honest about embarrassing symptoms,  avoid getting treated and even leave out important medical problems.

From PRweb

The 20 nationally recognized organizations are urging Congress to:

•    Restore the patient’s right of consent
•    Give patients the right to opt-out of having their records in any national or regional electronic health system
•    Give patients the right to segregate their most sensitive medical records
•    Require audit trails of all disclosures
•    Deny employers access to medical records
•    Require that patients be notified of all suspected or actual privacy breaches
•    Preserve stronger privacy protections in state laws
•    Enact meaningful enforcement and penalties for privacy violators

The organizations making up the coalition are the following:

American Civil Liberties Union
American Conservative Union
Asian American Justice Center
California Consumer Health Care Council
Christian Coalition of America
Common Cause
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
Consumer Action
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Fairfax County Privacy Council
Family Research Council
Free Congress Foundation
National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse
National Center for Transgender Equality
National Health Law Program
Patient Privacy Rights Foundation
Population Research Institute
Privacy Activism
Privacy Rights Now
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
Republican Liberty Caucus
Right March.com
Thoughtful House Center for Autism
U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation
U.S. Public Interest Research Group
U.S. Public Policy Committee for the Association for Computing Machinery