Data from a recent analysis suggest that a substantial number of popular health apps have major privacy and security shortcomings, with many not following standard practices and upcoming European Union data safety regulations.
The study, which examined a selection of 20 apps from the top 1080 of the “Medical” and “Health and Fitness” sections of the Google Play store, identified a number of minor...
The UK government will open a Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation to ensure ethical standards are at the forefront of AI and data-driven technology development.
The new advisory body will work with regulators, the industry and the government to pave the way for sensible AI adoption.
In addition, more than £75m will be invested to deliver recommendations from Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Jérôme...
An Illinois-based law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against telemedicine company MDLive, alleging that the company takes screenshots of sensitive patient health information and sends them to TestFairy, an Israeli company that does quality control on apps, and that this is a violation of patient privacy. MDLive, for its part, denies that there's anything improper about its procedures.
The...
Piggybacking on a Wall Street Journal story about how Castlight Health uses health data to drive healthcare savings for employers, The New York Times editorial board called Sunday for federal protections that would prevent employers from hiring or firing based on an employee's health data.
"[A] group of legal scholars has called for federal legislation that would bar companies from hiring or...
Last week at HIMSS, ONC Chief Privacy Officer Lucia Savage talked about what HIPAA doesn't say. On Thursday, her predecessor, former ONC privacy chief Joy Pritts, talked about what HIPAA doesn't cover. Pritts, now a consultant, was joined by Morgan Reed, the executive director of ACT The App Association, in a talk about pitfalls providers can fall into when it comes to patient data privacy.
"If I...
"Do-it-yourself healthcare", including mobile apps and consumer medical devices, is set to be the top healthcare trend of 2015, according to research and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. PwC announced its top 10 predicted healthcare trends of 2015 in a webinar promoting their new report, and their top three are mobile health-related trends, with mobile and digital playing a role in several...
UC Irvine researcher Gene Tsudik (Photo by Steve Zylius)
A team led by University of California-Irvine researchers has developed what's been called an Android-based smartphone paternity test. The app would allow two people, if they had access to their digitized genomes, to run a paternity test comparing their genomes, determine how closely related they are, and even scan their genome for...
