Kaiser printed Member IDs on their mailing labels in Colorado:
http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business/article/0,1299,DRMN_4_4087726,00.html
Behold the hypocrisy! When I called attention to Kaiser's OWN web site with the lists of member IDs, Kaiser painted me as a dangerous person, exposing highly confidential information. However, when Kaiser personnel accidentally deliver Member IDs to their printer, the "worse case scenario" of someone creating a fake Kaiser Membership card is "highly unlikely".
I knew when I voluntarily stopped linking to the Systems Diagrams *before* Kaiser sued me that Kaiser would exploit the opportunity to inflate the scariness of "confidential information" to the press. I expressed this concern directly to Kaiser's lawyers: and instead of offering me reassurance in that regard, they tried to use their power to issue lies about me to the press as a bargaining chip. This is probably the singlemost important reason I've held out against Kaiser: I don't believe corporations should be able to use their ability to manipulate the press as a substitute for an actual case in a legal action.
And here's my vindication! Here's Kaiser's own PR department minimizing the impact of publicizing Member IDs. According to Kaiser's own case against me, just drawing attention to their own web site that publicizes these Member IDs constitutes a horrific breach of privacy. When Kaiser tried to frame me for publishing that information, they invoked the potential suffering of children, and they claimed they had to hold back the people they called from "coming after" me. But now that Kaiser has made their little Colorado gaff, I'm sure such lynch mobs in the name of the children aren't so necessary.
While Kaiser is representing this as an "isolated incident", it resembles all their other "isolated incidents" in that this sort of screw up tends to happen when systems are linked via transmission of datasets. No matter how secure the storage of data may be, there is opportunity for all sorts of problems as data is sent to downstream systems. This will be the issue with massive EMR systems (or cobbled patchworks of systems represented as an EMR, like at Kaiser).
And addressing the problem by asking people to please rip up their mailing labels? Laughable.
On a related note, I just saw another article that reproduces Kaiser's PR attack in making it sound like I either stole or unlawfully accessed patient info, as opposed to finding it on a public web site. The last time I complained about this, I was told, probably untruthfully, that the online story that had already been published couldn't be changed, but there would be more "context" related in the future. Well, here's a future story in the same newspaper, and they went with helping Kaiser's PR spin again! I guess fiction is more "newsworthy" than the truth, especially if it's at the expense of a poor person who can't really do anything about it.
Update: Surprisingly, the above-mentioned newspaper (Mercury News) investigated, and they have offered to run a correction identifying me as the whistleblower in this case. Now if only NBC and the SF Chronicle would amend their Kaiser-fed "reports"...
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
corphq's journal