IIRC, in the first few pages of HIPAA it explains that the law is all about and only about the transfer of medical information over computer networks. It's not just applicable to insurance, it also applies to information transfers between hospitals and *any* electronic transfer of patient records. I learned all this while working for a private ambulance company, where this is a big deal due to the complex billing associated with transports.
Now, if downloading patient records from a court website isn't electronic transfer of patient records, than nothing is. This is a textbook example of a HIPAA violation, and someone should file a federal lawsuit. It's up to the court to figure out how not to break the federal code.
Any place secure enough to have that sort of restriction should probably be a little lower on your index of suspicion than say, a starbucks. If anyone is trying to steal something from there, it probably isn't your personal information.
This came up on a mailing list that I'm on. Someone pointed this out. If you look at the logs you will notice that it's been around for a while:
Fri Apr 6 19:07:23 2001 UTC (2 years, 10 months ago) by jberndt
There's also this
There you have it. Two old examples of a script contained in an XML file. So it anyone's worried, there's definitely prior art out there. It's of course possible that MS had stuff like this before that and their lawyers just got around to squirting out a patent for it, but it makes me feel a little better that people found this stuff so easily and quickly.
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IIRC, in the first few pages of HIPAA it explains that the law is all about and only about the transfer of medical information over computer networks. It's not just applicable to insurance, it also applies to information transfers between hospitals and *any* electronic transfer of patient records. I learned all this while working for a private ambulance company, where this is a big deal due to the complex billing associated with transports.
Now, if downloading patient records from a court website isn't electronic transfer of patient records, than nothing is. This is a textbook example of a HIPAA violation, and someone should file a federal lawsuit. It's up to the court to figure out how not to break the federal code.
Any place secure enough to have that sort of restriction should probably be a little lower on your index of suspicion than say, a starbucks. If anyone is trying to steal something from there, it probably isn't your personal information.
This came up on a mailing list that I'm on. Someone pointed this out. If you look at the logs you will notice that it's been around for a while:
Fri Apr 6 19:07:23 2001 UTC (2 years, 10 months ago) by jberndt
There's also this
There you have it. Two old examples of a script contained in an XML file. So it anyone's worried, there's definitely prior art out there. It's of course possible that MS had stuff like this before that and their lawyers just got around to squirting out a patent for it, but it makes me feel a little better that people found this stuff so easily and quickly.