Here’s a piece on the failure of medical privacy in Texas. Hospital-patient data for the years 1999 through 2003 are available at no charge. Data for the years 2004 through 2009 must be purchased, but the cost is minimal for a commercial user.

The hospital-patient Public Use Data Files contain more than 200 fields of information, naming everything from your insurance coverage, or lack of it, to whether or not your stay included placement of a heart stent, “sterilization,” “abortion performed due to rape,” or a drug- or alcohol-related diagnosis, along with what tests you got and when, and what medications you received.

Here is the full investigative report.

Ross

An NHS data quality manager has pleaded guilty to illegally going through patients’ medical records. Dale Trever, 22, allegedly looked at records on 431 occasions. All the records were of female patients. Furthermore, Trever snooped on records relating to family, friends and colleagues on 336 of these occasions…

Full story in ComputerWorld, which also has a relevant blog post by Tony Collins.