David Harlow of the HealthBlawg asks some tough questions over on LinkedIn about data security in healthcare in the wake of the news of the massive data breach at Community Health Systems.

In an op-ed in the New York Times this week called Let’s Not Talk About Sex, Paul Offitt says 2,000 adults will die every year because their parents didn’t have them vaccinated against HPV as kids and calls out doctors for failing to point out that the vaccine is about preventing cancer (and not sex).

An item on from Sunday that is included in NPR’s Shots section, When Patients Read What Their Doctor’s Write, discusses the benefits and limits of open notes and medical records.

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Halibig, King, and the ACA; and some posts in honor of a powerful voice for the patient experience.

Last week started out with a judicial bang in health policy news when two rulings by appeals courts on cases involving subsidies contradicted each other Tuesday, coverage here from the NY Times as well as a concise what happens next item.

Following those decisions this op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal and prompted this response by Nicholas Bagley (law professor at University of Michigan) on The Incidental Economist. Then, Jonathan Adler of the WSJ piece responded with this, to which Bagley replied with this. Others have weighed in on this, but I don’t want to get too carried away…

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As this comic ‘Research Ethics’ from xkcd sums up, there is a lot of confusion (and ethical grey area) surrounding the role of companies like Facebook and how they control the flow of information in unprecedented ways. You may have come across reports about Facebook’s “emotional contagion” experiment and some anger and confusion over how this research was conducted and published. In this post I will link to some explanations about what happened and hypotheses on why it received the reaction it did. Why discuss a site most MSK staff can’t see from our desks? Basically, because this news highlights an interesting change in how we get information (as well as how we produce it) and I think it’s something worth considering. Continue reading →