E-Commerce Blog

Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente announced plans for a pilot program that would exchange health information between the insurer’s My Health Manager service and the HealthVault personal health records service. The partnership comes amid a push to give people greater control of and access to their medical records. The move by technology companies including Google and Microsoft to bring personal health records online takes advantage of the shift from paper-based medical records to electronic health records by hospitals, doctors’ offices and insurers backed by the federal government.

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Kaiser Jumps Onto Microsoft’s Health Records Cloud

One of the common myths surrounding HIPAA is that it is not a privacy law at all, and that it weakened rather than strengthened individuals’ rights to health information privacy. That’s not the case at all, according to Deven McGraw, recently appointed director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Health Privacy Project. “This is completely unfounded. Before the HIPAA Privacy Rule was enacted, there were no federal standards protecting the privacy and security of health information,” McGraw said.

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HIPAA Revisited, Part 2: Seeking Balance