9 ms·
"One family practitioner in a suburb of Phoenix said a Theranos representative dropped off a stack of 20 corrected test reports a few weeks ago. Many of the voi
by aresant 10y ago
"One family practitioner in a suburb of Phoenix said a Theranos representative dropped off a stack of 20 corrected test reports a few weeks ago. Many of the voided results were for calcium, estrogen and testosterone tests.
The doctor said one corrected report is for a patient she sent to the emergency room after receiving abnormally elevated test results from Theranos in late 2014."
Tort attorneys should be licking their lips.
It would be shocking if Theranos survives this.
Beyond that Walgreens - the largest retail pharmacy chain in the USA and Theranos' wellness center partner - should also be in the crosshairs.
Feels like they should have had some better safeguards for consumers before committing to the 40-store pilot in AZ.
- dekhn 10y agoAn aside: doctors shouldn't be discussing people's test results, even if they anonymize and/or aggregate the patient data, without previously receiving consent, and even then I don't think it's really wise to provide quotes like this to reporters.
- pvnick 10y agoActually, sufficiently aggregated health data is generally fine to release publicly since it can not be tied to an individual. Anonymized data you must be very careful with, since individual data elements can frequently be combined to re-identify someone.
- sopooneo 10y agoIn support of your point about "sufficently aggregated" data, I occasionally work on projects that publish aggregate health statistics, and you have to be very careful about the size of your denominators. For instance, even without telling what numbers you are dividing, you probably couldn't publish the percentage of HIV positive results among pacific islanders in Nebraska. Because there might be only six such people.
- pvnick 10y agoGood point!
- facetube 10y agoIIRC this is why HHS and HIPAA regulations specify "all ages over 89" as protected health information for purposes of data deidentification – there just aren't that many people who have lived that long.
- dragonwriter 10y agoIt also specifies all date elements for patient-specific events (including treatment) more specific than the year must be removed for deidentification generally.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- robryk 10y agoSo "I treated a skier with a broken leg in the last skiing season" is something a doctor can't say? (Skiing season is shorter than a year.) Actually, giving a year of a winter/summer sport-related accident already provides a shorter window for when the accident has occurred. So should all case reports about such be giving at least a two year long window?
- sib 10y agoOddly enough, it turns out to be 836(!), which is definitely higher than I would have guessed. http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/nebraska/demographic.html http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/nebraska/demographi...
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoThose are presumably not all HIV positive.
- dekhn 10y agoAll of the responses to my comment are missing the point: you're discussing medical researchers. This was a random doctor in the affected area who spoke to reporters. I'm quite aware of what is acceptable to release in a medical context; this was not that.
- pvnick 10y agoI'm not sure what the problem is though. In all likelihood the doctor has been trained on HIPAA procedures.
- dragonwriter 10y agoAnd yet seems to have violated them (I've cited the specific section of regs elsewhere in the thread). But deidentification is one of those things people who don't freak with it often, even trained in the rules, always seem to think is easier than it is.
- dekhn 10y agoI never said the doctor violated a law. I think what the doctor said (in speaking about a specific patient): "The doctor said one corrected report is for a patient she sent to the emergency room after receiving abnormally elevated test results from Theranos in late 2014." was ethically dubious. Most of the people who are replying negatively to my comments are misinterpreting my position: either suggesting that I implied there was a HIPAA violation, or that I think medical research data should be suppressed. Neither of those is true.
- CamperBob2 10y agoI'm quite aware of what is acceptable to release in a medical context; this was not that. I'm sure you'll be able to cite the regulation that was broken, then.
- jonlucc 10y agoThere are well-considered standards for patient anonymity. Saying "I had a patient with X disease" is not compromising the identity of the patient. Without that, doctors couldn't teach medicine to med students or explain their cases at conferences.
- SilasX 10y agoFair enough, but I'm not sure that will be good enough for much longer. With bigger and better datasets it should be increasingly easy to de-anonymize someone based on just knowing something like that.
- rhizome 10y agoSomething like what, that a specific doctor has treated someone with a specific condition? I'm not sure that's enough metadata.
- Dr_tldr 10y agoI can confirm that's not and could never be a HIPAA violation. The information that Doctor X once ordered a blood test for John or Jane Doe with Result Z is totally fine. There's no non-HIPAA violating metadata that could make that information useful.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- iofj 10y agoThere are papers about de-anonimizing patient records and they show that for instance, patient records + facebook is definitely enough to fill in the names correctly.
- jonathankoren 10y agoYou do realize that with your standard of never-say-anything you're calling pretty much 200 years of medical study on violation.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoThat's not quite how HIPPA works. I don't see anything wrong with the amount of information given here. How else could they talk about stuff like this, anyway? It's important to get out there for people to be aware of.
- kosmic_k 10y agoAs long as HIPAA rules are followed I don't see an issue. Further more I would argue that the doctors in this case have a moral imperative to inform the public just how harmful these faulty test results have been. It is becoming clear that Theranos has harmed patients and public knowledge of this is crucial to discover more cases and inform those whom may have had medical decisions made on faulty testing.
- dragonwriter 10y agoUnless specifically cleared by a deidentification expert as provided in 45 CFR 164.514(b)(1), this doesn't meet the requirements of HIPAA for deidentification of information derived from PHI, since it does not remove "All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to an individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, date of death" [0], in that it includes the specific month of the test. [0] 45 CFR 164.514(b)(2)(i)(C)
- aub3bhat 10y agoNo your interpretation is wrong. Date does not means month. Date contains Day/Month/Year. Here are 2.5 Million raw inpatient visits released by New York State meeting criteria for HIPAA Limited data, as you can see not only do they contain month and year but also day of the week. [1,2] [1] http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/institutional_review_board/hipaa_research/limited_data_set.html http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/institutional_review_board/hi... [2] https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Hospital-Inpatient-Discharges-SPARCS-De-Identified/u4ud-w55t https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Hospital-Inpatient-Dischar...
- ramchip 10y agoI might be missing the obvious, but I don't see any months in the de-identified dataset you linked? Your second link also says a limited dataset is considered PHI and can only be shared with third party under certain conditions and with a data use agreement.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ldehaan 10y agothat's the kind of thinking that is the reason we have such bad medicine. medicine and all its research needs to be open, people have no privacy anywhere else, and to keep insisting on it for medical data is only allowing governments and huge corporations to take advantage of our lack of knowledge about drug affects etc.. the major reason there is even a debate about vaccines is because of this weird belief that we need to keep medical records siloed from researchers and the public when this information is probably of the highest value to us as a society. but instead we just post everything else about ourselves on the Internet and those things can actually be used to hurt or segregate us from knowledge that will help us overall. one of those weird things I've never understood about society's ability to be completely distracted from its own self interest.
- zodiac 10y agoAre you suggesting all health records should be available to the public?
- intopieces 10y agoYes, they should. And they should make it easier to do so. Privacy in medicine is holding us back.
- dma_dma 10y agoWalgreens really blew it on this one. The executives responsible for Theranos deal all got canned years ago for unrelated reasons. NYT had an overview of Walgreen's struggle. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/business/a-once-avid-ally-walgreens-is-struggling-to-shake-off-theranos.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/business/a-once-avid-ally-... "The Wall Street Journal reported that Walgreens was so eager to cement the relationship that it lent Theranos money, acquired warrants to buy Theranos stock and skipped its usual due diligence when evaluating a pharmacy partner." "The Walgreens executives responsible for the Theranos deal, including Mr. Wasson, as well as the chief financial officer and the president of the company’s pharmacy unit, have all been replaced, forced out in 2014 by activist investors after Walgreens acquired the European drugstore chain Alliance Boots."
- gohrt 10y agoWalgreens has long been a creepy organization. Their checkout clerks were paid on commission to hawk upsells like vitamins.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoA lot of retail forces cashiers to upsell shit, like when I was a cashier at Whole Foods and we had to ask customers to donate to the Whole Planet Foundation.
- smokey_the_bear 10y agoHow often does someone actually donate?
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoYou'd be surprised. Esp in Palo Alto.
- SocksCanClose 10y ago
- pessimizer 10y ago> It would be shocking if Theranos survives this. According to the last paragraph, they're still expanding. "Last week, Siemens delivered lab equipment to a Theranos facility in the Harrisburg, Pa., area, according to the person familiar with the matter. The person said Theranos is preparing to open there what would be the company’s third lab." I'm still not willing to bet everybody involved won't come out fantastically rich.
- speby 10y agoAs in, you mean you're still willing to bet that everybody involved WILL come out fantastically rich, despite all the major setbacks thus far?
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y agoThat doesn't mean anything much. The equipment could have been ordered months before and if so, was likely on a NC/NR (No Cancellation/No Return) purchase order. When I was in the business, we built stuff more or less to order. You don't want to warehouse a bunch of machines that cost you almost $100k each to build.