Chesley Richards

See the following -

How Data Brokers Make Money Off Your Medical Records

Adam Tanner | Scientific American | February 1, 2016

A growing number of companies specialize in gathering longitudinal information from hundreds of millions of hospitals' and doctors' records, as well as from prescription and insurance claims and laboratory tests. Pooling all these data turns them into a valuable commodity. Other businesses are willing to pay for the insights that they can glean from such collections to guide their investments in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, or more precisely tailor an advertising campaign promoting a new drug...

Read More »

No One Knows How Many Patients Are Dying from Superbug Infections in California Hospitals

Melody Petersen | LA Times | October 2, 2016

Many thousands of Californians are dying every year from infections they caught while in hospitals. But you’d never know that from their death certificates. Sharley McMullen of Manhattan Beach came down with a fever just hours after being wheeled out of a Torrance Memorial Medical Center operating room on May 4, 2014. A missionary’s daughter who worked as a secretary at Cape Canaveral, Fla., at the height of the space race, McMullen, 72, was there for treatment of a bleeding stomach ulcer. Soon, though, she was fighting for her life...

Read More »

Strengthening Protection of Patient Medical Data

Adam Tanner | The Century Foundation | January 10, 2017

Americans seeking medical care expect a certain level of privacy. Indeed, the need for patient privacy is a principle dating back to antiquity, and is codified in U.S. law, most notably the Privacy Rule of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which establishes standards that work toward protecting patient health information. But the world of information is rapidly changing, and in this environment, U.S. rules fall precariously short in protecting our medical data...

Read More »