Mar 26 2010
Fox News: Some privacy advocates say the government is seeking to move too quickly to digitize health records, and may risk exposing sensitive information to identity thieves and hackers. These privacy advocates appear to favor slow progress is spreading electronic records because - they hope - consumer safeguards can keep up with that pace. One advocate likened the rate of digitization up to this point to an ox cart, adding that upcoming federal investments in expanding electronic records could "basically put modern jet engines on that ox cart and [tip] it over" (3/24).
Associated Press/Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "Gov. Beverly Perdue said Wednesday that North Carolina can recover tens of millions dollars annually by shifting more Medicaid investigations from file cabinets to computer files that can be flagged for potential abuse and fraud in the state's $10 billion system." Fraud investigators normally use paper documents, but the new program will rely on software that processes billing data and identifies irregularities (Robertson, 3/24).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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