Premera Blue Cross Breach May Have Exposed 11 Million Customers' Medical And Financial Data

By Kate Vinton
Forbes
Originally published March 17, 2015

Medical and financial data belonging to as many as 11 million Premera Blue Cross customers may have been exposed in a breach discovered on the same day as the Anthem breach, the health insurance company announced Tuesday.

Premera discovered the breach on January 29, 2015. Working with both Mandiant and the FBI to investigate the attack, the company discovered that the initial attack occurred on May 5, 2014. Premera Blue Cross and Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alaska were both impacted, in addition to affiliate brands Vivacity and Connexion Insurance Solutions. Additionally, other Blue Cross Blue Shield customers in Washington and Alaska may have been affected by the breach.

The entire article is here.

ONC advancing Blue Button, CDS standards efforts

Automating the Blue Button to Exchange PHI

Mary Mosquera
Senior Editor, Government Health IT
Originally published on September 26, 2012

Developers in an ONC voluntary community are beginning to drill down into what will be required to automate the Blue Button feature to exchange patient health information at the consumer’s request under different scenarios.

The Blue Button enables patients to view and download their information in simple text format and is currently available to veterans, military service members and Medicare beneficiaries. A few private sector health organizations have begun to make it available to their members.

The ONC’s Standards & Interoperability Framework community has just created three panels to identify standards and tools to push personal data to a specific location, such as using Direct secure messaging protocols and the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), and allowing a third-party application to access personal health data on demand, in a pull transmission, according to Doug Fridsma, MD, director of ONC’s Office of Standards and Interoperability and acting chief scientist.

The entire story is here.

Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter

By Gina Kolata
The New York Times
Originally 25, 2012

Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan stared at a printout of gene sequences from a man with cancer, a subject in one of his studies. There, along with the man’s cancer genes, was something unexpected — genes of the virus that causes AIDS.

It could have been a sign that the man was infected with H.I.V.; the only way to tell was further testing. But Dr. Chinnaiyan, who leads the Center for Translational Pathology at the University of Michigan, was not able to suggest that to the patient, who had donated his cells on the condition that he remain anonymous.

In laboratories around the world, genetic researchers using tools that are ever more sophisticated to peer into the DNA of cells are increasingly finding things they were not looking for, including information that could make a big difference to an anonymous donor.

The question of how, when and whether to return genetic results to study subjects or their families “is one of the thorniest current challenges in clinical research,” said Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. “We are living in an awkward interval where our ability to capture the information often exceeds our ability to know what to do with it.”

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Such ethical quandaries grow more immediate year by year as genome sequencing gets cheaper and easier. More studies include gene sequencing and look at the entire genome instead of just one or two genes. Yet while some findings are clear-cut — a gene for colon cancer, for example, will greatly increase the disease risk in anyone who inherits it — more often the significance of a genetic change is not so clear. Or, even if it is, there is nothing to be done.

The entire story is here.