Keyose Blog - Personal Health Records

As reported by the Washington Post a new case of stolen laptop has toke place.
A government laptop computer containing sensitive medical information on 2,500 patients enrolled in a National Institutes of Health study was stolen in February, potentially exposing seven years’ worth of clinical trial data, including names, medical diagnoses and details of the patients’ heart scans. The information was not encrypted, in violation of the government’s data-security policy.
… “The shocking part here is we now have personally identifiable information — name and age — linked to clinical data,” said Leslie Harris…

Again and again… there is no 100% secure system. Privacy through anonymity was our leitmotif in keyose. And it will be.

As repoted in ksl.com Thousands of people are being cautioned to keep their eyes on their credit reports tonight. A laptop with names, Social Security numbers and personal health information was stolen from University Health Care in Salt Lake City.

In Keyose we know there is no 100% secure system. As a Doctor I understand that when talking about personal health information breaches a “one between a billion chance” is simply unacceptable.

For that reason, Keyose was designed to be a anonymous personal health record. A anonymous-non identifiable database in a stolen laptop would not be a privacy problem at all.

During the last days some big Health Plans in USA are releasing PHRs services. Vince Kuraitis analyses the reasons behind the failure on the adoption by the users of these services:

• Lack of Trust
• Lack of Access to Clinical Data
• Lack of Permission
• Lack of Convenience in Consumer Workflow

I read an interesting post from Gunther Eysenbach (a widely recognized academic on medical informatics) where he reminds his concerns about privacy and the presence of google ads in a online Personal Health Record.

“I see one particular privacy threat which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere. The privacy threat is created whenever a personal health record (or any other sort of dynamic, private information) is combined with Google Ads, because Google Ads are created by third parties, and Google Ads are keyword/context triggered. Any combination of Google Ads with any sort of personal health information spells a privacy disaster.
Why? Imagine I am a bad guy who wants to compile a database of people with the condition “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis”. It is now a matter of five minutes to set up an ad at Google AdWords which is triggered by the keyword “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis”. Google AdWords also lets me define a target site, so I could define health.google.com or any other online PHR site such as myPHRsite.com as the sole target site where the ad (context-triggered) should appear. Now, whenever a user on that site would review his personal health record with integrated Google Ads, my ad would be triggered only if the word “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis” shows up in my record. The consumer of course does not know this and if the ad is something innocuous such as “Click here to receive a free gift basket” he might click on the ad and - bingo - all I (as the bad guy) have to do is to link to a questionnaire pretending to send a gift to the consumer, asking for his/her personal information - name, address etc. Thus, I have a list of people who have the keyword “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis” showing up in their Personal Health Record.
Yes, it is that simple. ”

The first priority of Keyose is privacy and we agree with Eysenbach about the threath. In that sense we have decided to never include Adwords or Adsense advertising in Keyose service. We will never put our personal, our patients or our relatives health information in a service that provided AdSense in their website. You can trust us!