Current Events

It's been more than two decades since President Bill Clinton signed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act into law in 1996. Since then, the rule has arguably become far more synonymous with its privacy provisions than the health plan flexibility for which it's named.

And 20 years later, its rules – made all the more complex by the rise of health information technology and the electronic data exchange it enables – continue to confuse patients and providers alike, according to the American Health Information Management Association.

Read more . . .

Medtronic Plc said on Thursday it was recalling devices used to manage build-up of the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the brain due to increased complaints.

Medtronic's StrataMR adjustable valves and shunts are used in the management of hydrocephalus or 'water on the brain'.

Read More

Two recent train derailments at Pennsylvania Station in New York that created major travel disruptions were caused by track defects, Amtrak officials said on Thursday, increasing concerns about the aging infrastructure at North America’s busiest train station.

Officials also acknowledged that they had been aware of a defect on the tracks at the site of a derailment on Monday before it occurred, but did not recognize the urgency of the problem.

Read more . . .

Larger hospitals and those with major teaching status are the most at-risk for a data breach, according to a Monday report by the Journal of the American Medical Association recent JAMA research report found. The report highlights why institutions with greater access to data are being targeted by hackers.

There were 216 hospitals included in the 1,798 breaches that occurred between Oct. 21, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2016 -- and more than a third were teaching hospitals.
Read more . . .

A ransomware attack at San Antonio-based ABCD Children’s Pediatrics may have breached the data of 55,447 patients.

Affected files may have included patient names, Social Security numbers, insurance billing information, dates of birth, medical records, laboratory results, procedure technology codes, demographic data, address and telephone numbers.

Pediatric patient records are a high commodity on the dark web, according to ICIT Senior Fellow James Scott. There two markets for child records, one including tax fraud. These are long form, full medical records available for sale.
Read more . . .

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday released a warning letter sent in January to a clinical investigator working on a study of Pfizer’s nicotine addiction treatment Chantix (varenicline tartrate).

Following an inspection at the clinical site between 15 August 2016 and 14 September 2016, FDA says in the letter that Indianapolis-based Cassandra Curtis, MD, failed to adhere to the investigational plan’s protocol requiring certain subjects to be excluded and other requirements on the use of certain medications.

Read More

New data collected from thousands of drivers suggest that more than half of all trips that ended in a crash also included some form of distraction from a mobile phone.

The data also found that in nearly a quarter of crashes, the driver was using a phone within a minute before the crash occurred, and perhaps even at the moment of the crash.

Read more . . .

GSK Plc is voluntarily recalling more than 593,000 Ventolin asthma inhalers from U.S. hospitals, pharmacies, retailers and wholesalers due to a defect that may cause them to deliver fewer doses of the medicine than indicated, the British drugmaker said on Tuesday.

The company said it had received an elevated number of product complaints about a bulging of the outside wrapper, indicating a leak of the propellant that delivers the medicine. The recall involves three lots of the Ventolin HFA 200D inhalers manufactured at GSK's plant in Zebulon, North Carolina.
Read more . . .

An E. coli outbreak that has sickened 29 people in 12 states has been linked to soy nut butter products from a Kentucky-based processing plant.

The Food and Drug Administration has suspended production at Dixie Dew Products in Erlanger, Kentucky. The FDA identified Dixie Dew as the most likely source of E. coli contamination in I.
Read more . . .

Food recalls related to illness outbreaks tend to get a lot of headlines, but undeclared allergens in foods continue to be a leading cause of recalls.

In the past 60 days, there have been 44 food recalls posted by the Food and Drug Administration, with 19 of them for undeclared allergens. That would have by far accounted for the majority of food recalls, had it not been for 10 cheese recalls that involved one manufacturer.

Read more . . .

Millions of Americans are riding around in potentially dangerous cars with unfixed safety defects. Chances are good that either you, your neighbor, or the guy in the next lane is one of them.

The number of vehicles that have been recalled but not brought in for repairs shot up to an estimated 63 million this year, an increase of 34 percent from a year ago, according to Carfax, the Virginia-based provider of vehicle history reports.

That translates to 1 in every 4 vehicles on the road, up from a more typical average of 1 in 5 in recent years.

Read more . . .