HIPAA violations go mass production

Stanford let demographic information on 20,000 ER visits escape onto the web.

A billing contractor created a spreadsheet containing names, account numbers, diagnosis, and length of stay for every admission to the ER for 6 months. Somehow, this spreadsheet was uploaded as an attachment to a post asking for help making bar-charts (you can't make this up) to the tutoring website Student of Fortune. The information remained on the site freely available from September 2010 to August 2011.

Get all the details at the New York Times.

Maybe the next time we get alarmed about the threat to privacy from a case report or educational lecture we should think about the losers that are releasing medical data by the bucketful.

If you are giving a commencement speech be original, don't steal

Arrogant? Stupid? Both?

Incredible story today comes from the University of Alberta Medical School where the dean, Phil Baker, plagiarized Atul Gawande's Stanford commencement address from 2010 during U of A's own graduation ceremony. My favorite part is the students using iPhones to discover the intellectual property theft during the speech:

"A couple of the students recognized the term 'velluvial matrix,' which is in Mr. Gawande's speech," said class president Brittany Barber. "They Googled it on their phones.

For anyone to think they could rip-off a high profile author in this day and age is the height of arrogance and or stupidity.

Buying and selling of Kidneys for transplant: The biggest ethical question in nephrology.

In India kidneys are widely available for purchse. This allows people with the means to get a kidney. The people with the means include Americans and Europeans as transplant tourists. organ tours.

JAMA published an article in 2002 showed that most of the donors are poor people in debt and a few years later they are still or again in debt and have experienced a decline in health. An essay in Lancet the following years details the global organ traffic and some of its negative consequences.

Despite these horrors they abysmal supply of organs makes the concept of buying and selling organs appealing. I have confidence that a well regulated market place for organs could improve the supply and avoid the horrors which result from the under-the-table, unregulated bazaar that currently exists.

Sally Satel outlines the pro argument in a couple of essays.

• When altruism isn't moral
• Organs for sale