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Medical ID Theft – Identity Theft that can Kill You! |
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An article in the Dallas Morning News reports on medical identity theft and how it can ruin your finances as well as your health. This type of ID theft occurs when the thief uses your personal information, such as your health insurance information, to obtain medical services or to make false claims for medical services. It’s one thing to get billed for a medical procedure that you never had, it’s quite another thing to have false entries placed in your health records. This can result in you receiving the wrong medical treatment, discovering that your health insurance has been used up, or that you are now uninsurable due to these false medical entries.
The article says that the usual way that a person discovers that his personal information has been stolen is when he is billed for a medical procedure that he never received. Obviously, when this happens, you should immediately contact the hospital or doctor that sent the bill and tell them of the error. Some useful tips are given in the article, such as to be sure to guard your health insurance card as you would a credit card (something I never thought about!) and to make sure that no one seems to be listening when the medical receptionist asks for your social security number (usually they don’t ask, but they do request it on your medical history form).
Because all types of hospital employees have access to your medical records, hospitals are starting to take steps to ensure that different types of workers have access to different degrees of your medical data. A far cry from when I was a medical technologist (1970 to 1987) and had unlimited access to all the patients’s charts as did any other hospital employee. As the push is on to put more and more personal health records online, medical identity theft becomes more of a possibility and a more of a problem.
The article also has a list of steps to take if you are a victim of medical ID theft and lists 4 good websites where you can get help, including how to file a health information privacy complaint with the appropriate federal agency. |
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Submitted by: Alice McCreary, Reference Librarian
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Ocean and Coastal Law and Policy |
 By Donald C. Baur, Tim Eichenberg, editorsThis book brings together the expertise and insights of the country’s leading scholars and practitioners in the field of ocean and coastal law. Covering the full array of issues in ocean and coastal law from maritime jurisdiction and boundaries to water quality protection to fisheries management and marine mammal protection to offshore energy development and climate change. Ocean and Coastal Law and Policy provides an authoritative yet practical resource for practitioners, government officials, and scholars to understand and build upon the current legal framework of our ocean and coastal policies. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Web Content Coordinator
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Let’s Get Comfy Around the Ol’ PC With a Big Bowl of Popcorn |
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ComScore reports that Americans watched more than 12 billion online videos during May 2008. YouTube (owned by Google) accounted for more than 4 billion of these — 35% of the total. There are tons of interesting data in the press release. Did you know that in May visitors to Hulu.com watched 88 million full-length TV programs? However, the one fact that really struck me was this: the duration of the average online video was 2.7 minutes. Has our attention span shrunk that much? Hello? I said, “Has our attention span shrunk that much?” Hello? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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How to Deal With Your Lawyer: Answers to Commonly Asked Questions |
 By Lawrence J. Fox, Susan R. MartynEach year more and more Americans find themselves in some sort of legal bind and in need of obtaining counsel. The first steps may seem daunting, but authors, Lawrence J. Fox and Susan R. Martyn in How to Deal with Your Lawyer: Answers to Commonly Asked Questions offer an accessible resource to guide you through the entire process. Library Record • Borrow it • Buy it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Web Content Coordinator
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Retire - And Start Your Own Business: Five Steps to Success |
 By Dennis J. Sargent, Martha S. SargentIf you plan to retire and start your own business then this book is for you. A comprehensive, step-by-step guide, Retire — And Start Your Own Business is packed with practical, hands-on tools (including a CD-ROM) to help entrepreneurs like you pick and run a perfect business. Library Record • Borrow it • Buy it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Web Content Coordinator
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Yowie! [UPDATED] |
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OK … everyone who’s ever viewed a video on YouTube, raise your hand. Thank you. Put ‘em down now. Yesterday a federal judge ordered Google to violate your privacy. Big time. Judge Louis L. Stanton of the federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to turn over, on “a few ‘over-the-shelf’ four-terabyte hard drives” its YouTube logging database, which contains: “for each instance a video is watched, the unique ‘login ID’ of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (’IP address’), and the identifier for the video.” The plaintiff in the case, Viacom, is suing Google over copyrighted videos uploaded to YouTube. They want this data to prove that copyrighted content is viewed more often than user-generated stuff. But they don’t need login IDs and IP addresses in order to do that. So why does Viacom want them? They’re taking a page out of the RIAA’s book. I bet they’re going to pick a few high-profile individuals or firms and then sue ‘em. (”Dear [insert name of prestigous law firm]: It has come to our attention that employees of your firm have viewed [insert ridiculously large number here] copyrighted videos from Comedy Central on YouTube during business hours.”) It’ll scare the snot out of a lot of folks. I hope Google resists this. It worries me. I love the Web. Heck, my job title is “Internet Librarian”. But all of this technology — and especially content aggregators such as Google — makes it so easy to slowly-but-surely erode my personal liberties. Update 7/15/2008: Yesterday Google and Viacom worked out an agreement to anonymize the data: “When producing data from the Logging Database pursuant to the Order, Defendants shall substitute values while preserving uniqueness for entries in the following fields: User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID. The parties shall agree as promptly as feasible on a specific protocol to govern this substitution whereby each unique value contained in these fields shall be assigned a correlative unique substituted value, and preexisting interdependencies shall be retained in the version of the data produced.” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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RIP Windows XP, 2001-2008 |
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Today we bid a fond farewell to Windows XP. I, personally, said goodbye about a year-and-a-half ago. We’ll all miss those pretty blue screens, right? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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Update on England’s National Health Service IT Programme and the Security Factor |
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One of my previous blogs reported on a poll that showed that many English physicians planned to boycott the National Health Service’s patient health record database. One of their fears is that a patient’s personal health data could be accessed by hackers and blackmailers. Also important to the success of the programme is the patient’s own confidence that their health record will be secure. A recent report by the National Audit Office, which was released in mid-May, identified patient confidence in the security of their personal health records as one of the major challenges of the programme that must be managed to ensure that the programme succeeds. When the programme is in place, each patient’s Summary Care Record will be accessible anywhere in England by NHS staff involved in that patient’s care. Since each patient can choose to not have a health record created and/or to not allow it to be shared with NHS staff, the programme has less of a chance of success, the more patients “opt out”. On a positive note, the May report stated that only a small proportion of patients in the early adapter areas are choosing not to share their Summary Care Records. Obviously, for a patient to choose to allow access to their health record, they must be confident and remain confident that their information will be kept secure and will be handled appropriately. NHS Connecting for Health has adopted policies on secure processing, transmission, and storage of patient information, and a range of controls have been put in place to prevent unauthorized access to data. Some of these include the use of multiple security measures to protect the system and the encryption of patient information before that information is transferred electronically.
Another factor to maintain a patient’s confidence is to assure him that the actions of NHS and NHS staff members will be “above board”. The Department and NHS have developed a “Care Record Guarantee” which details principles that will be applied in handling electronic care records. Access to care records are controlled through the use of Smartcards and passwords and individuals are granted access to information based on their role and level of involvement in that patient’s care. Not following these principles could result in disciplinary actions or possible legal proceedings against the staff member. The report stresses that maintaining the patient’s confidence is crucial to the programme’s success and recommends that all security principles be “rigorously” applied.
England’s Health IT Programme is a work in progress that continues to be interesting to follow. I look forward to the National Audit Office’s next report. |
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Submitted by: Alice McCreary, Reference Librarian
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Courts Records & Briefs - Jenkins’ Unique Collection |
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Jenkins has an extensive records and briefs collection of Pennsylvania Appellate Courts: Supreme, Superior, and Commonwealth, and records and briefs of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and US Supreme Court. There are many valuable components of records and briefs that would draw the attention of both legal and non-legal researchers. In addition to being an excellent example of how to prepare an appellate brief, they also contain a table of citations or authorities that affords the researcher relevant cases on a specific point of law. The appellate record may be a rich resource if you looking for copies of the complaint, answer, preliminary objections, transcript of oral testimony, lower court opinion, or other items. The Jenkins’ Courts Records & Briefs collection is large and growing. It is also noteworthy in the sense that the researcher has access to an index to documents published between 1832 and the present. The index is available via Internet at: www.jenkinslaw.org/crb/index.php. There are some documents that are not yet included in Jenkins’ electronic index. If you cannot find a needed document, do not hesitate to email or to call Jenkins’ Reference. The law librarians may be able to locate it for you. More information on how to access records and briefs may be found on the Court Records & Briefs Guide, available at: www.jenkinslaw.org/crb/guide/. |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Web Content Coordinator
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Children and the Law in a Nutshell, 3d |
 By Sarah H. Ramsey, Douglas E. AbramsThis guide follows the structure and format of the authors’ casebook, Children and the Law: Doctrine, Policy and Practice. The authors have devoted entire chapters to the meaning of parent, abuse and neglect, the foster care system, adoption, medical decision making, support and other financial responsibilities, protective legislation, and delinquency. Representation of children is also covered throughout the book, as are several relevant international law issues, including the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, international child labor, and U.S. tobacco exports to children overseas. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Web Content Coordinator
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