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"Reporting from Washington - When your doctor writes you a prescription, that's just between you, your doctor and maybe your health insurance company -- right? Wrong. As things stand now, the pharmaceutical companies that make those prescription drugs are looking over the doctor's shoulder to keep track of how many prescriptions for each drug the physician is writing. By obtaining data from pharmacies and health insurers, the drug companies learn the prescribing habits of thousands of doctors. That information has become not just a powerful sales and marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry but also a source of growing concern among some elected officials, healthcare advocates and legal authorities. "

Customers of CVS' pharmacy will be able to import their prescription records into a Google Health account as a result of an expanded deal between the two companies. The deal was announced Monday. An earlier deal already allowed workers whose company uses CVS Caremark to handle drug benefits to use Google Health to store their drug records. The new deal expands this to customers of CVS' network of retail pharmacies. "We now offer all of our consumers the ability to download their prescription and medication history into their Google Health Personal Health Record, whether they are CVS/pharmacy customers, CVS Caremark plan participants or visitors to our MinuteClinic locations," said CVS Caremark Executive Vice President Helena Foulkes in a statement. "By enabling patients to download their prescription information directly into their personal health record, we are helping to close the gap in today's fragmented health care system and provide a full view of a patient's health." To use the tool, the companies said, consumers need to sign up for the prescription management feature on CVS.com as well as be authenticated. With the latest deal, Google said it now believes more than 100 million Americans will have the option of viewing their drug history within Google Health. Microsoft, which is also trying to sign consumers up for its HealthVault service, announced a deal with New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday which will allow patients of that hospital system to export their records to a HealthVault account.

Two companies that collect, analyze and sell prescription information are mounting a Supreme Court challenge to New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation law making doctors' prescription writing habits confidential. In an appeal filed March 27, IMS Health Inc. of Norwalk, Conn., and Verispan LLC of Yardley, Pa., tell the high court that the law violates their First Amendment right to free speech in pursuit of their business. The law, aimed at thwarting hard-sell tactics by drug companies to doctors, makes it a crime for pharmacies and others to transfer information disclosing a doctor's prescribing history if the information could be used for marketing of prescription drugs in New Hampshire. Patients' names are not included in the data. The companies say that the ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston that upheld the law's constitutionality could be broadly applied to newspaper publication of stock market information and many other services that gather large amounts of information. The money made by selling the information to drug makers, the companies say, allows them to provide the same material to researchers and humanitarian organizations at little or no cost. The law first took effect in 2006. The following year, U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro in Concord ruled in the companies' favor and said the law violated the First Amendment. Another federal judge subsequently ruled against a similar law in Maine, relying heavily on the New Hampshire decision. But the 1st Circuit overruled Barbadoro, calling the law a valid step to promote the delivery of cost-effective health care. "Even if the prescription Information Law amounts to a regulation of protected speech - a proposition with which we disagree - it passes constitutional muster," the court said. "In combating this novel threat to cost-effective delivery of health care, New Hampshire has acted with as much forethought and precision as the circumstances permit and the

The FBI and Virginia State Police are searching for hackers who demanded that the state pay them a $10 million ransom by Thursday for the return of millions of personal pharmaceutical records they say they stole from the state's prescription drug database. The hackers claim to have accessed 8 million patient records and 35 million prescriptions collected by the prescription Monitoring Program. "This was an intentional criminal act against the commonwealth by somebody who was trying to harm others," Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) said. "There are breaches that happen by accident or glitches that you try to work out. It's difficult to foil every criminal that may want to do something against you." Although the hackers had threatened to sell the data if they did not receive payment by Thursday, the deadline passed with no immediate sign that they followed through. ad_icon State officials say it is unclear whether the hackers were able to view the patient records, as they have claimed. If the theft is real, it would be the most serious cybercrime the state has faced in recent history.

"Drug store chain Walgreens now enables its pharmacy patients to download their prescription history from the Walgreens.com Web site to a personal health record on the Microsoft HealthVault platform. The Deerfield, Ill.-based chain announced last June it would link to HealthVault. Patients registered on Walgreens' site already can access their complete prescription history. Now, that history can also reside in a HealthVault PHR and be automatically updated. Patients can enroll with HealthVault directly from the Walgreens site. The partnership will promote stronger collaboration among patients, pharmacists, physicians and other providers, says Don Huonker, senior vice president of health care innovation at Walgreens. More information is available at walgreens.com/pharmacy and healthvault.com. "

Think twice before giving MicroSoft your personal health care information.

With the nation's strictest data security law set to take effect Jan. 1 in Massachusetts, mobile phone merchant Dennis Kelly plans to parlay the regulations into a competitive advantage. Kelly will display signs at each point-of-sale device inside 28 Wireless City shops, of which he is co-owner, stating that the company complies with the state's new mandate and that protecting customers' personal information is a company-wide priority. He says that as his business has grown in a few short years, adhering to the new requirements - namely, establishing an official information security policy and deploying more stringent access control solutions - was necessary, regardless of the impending legal obligation. And now he wants to show that investment off. "We can set ourselves apart from competitors by communicating that we take this stuff seriously," he says. "I think we will be somewhat unique in that regard." Kelly's take on the regulations - the first time any state has issued such a comprehensive and prescriptive list of measures that must be taken to protect data - appears to be in direct contrast to most other business owners across the Bay State.

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As health care providers determine how they will take advantage of the $19 billion allocated in the stimulus package to help jumpstart advances in health information technology (HIT), consumer appetite for electronic health records (EHRs), online tools and services is also growing, according to the results of the 2009 Deloitte Survey of Health Care Consumers (www.deloitte.com/us/2009consumersurvey). While only 9 percent of consumers surveyed have an electronic personal health record (PHR), 42 percent are interested in establishing PHRs connected online to their physicians. Fifty-five percent want the ability to communicate with their doctor via email to exchange health information and get answers to questions. Fifty-seven percent reported they'd be interested in scheduling appointments, buying prescriptions and completing other transactions online if their information is protected. Technologies that can facilitate consumer transactions with providers and health plans, like integrated billing systems that make bill payment faster and more convenient, are also appealing to nearly half (47 percent) of consumers surveyed. The survey of more than 4,000 U.S. consumers 18 and over was released today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference held in Chicago. It is the second annual study examining health care consumers' attitudes, behaviors and unmet needs conducted by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions offering health care industry leaders and policymakers a timely look at how health care consumerism is evolving. "Consumers are increasingly embracing innovations that enhance self-care, convenience, personalization and control of personal health information," said Paul H. Keckley, Ph.D., executive director, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. "Consumers want a bigger say in their health care decisions. Consumer demand for HIT and its potential impact on reforming the system has never been stronger." Despite strong con

A health care industry coalition on Monday released a prescriptive security framework that organizations can use to safeguard patient records as they increasingly move online. The framework, released by the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) -- which represents health care providers, pharmacies, insurers, biotech firms and medical device manufacturers -- is based on well-known standards such as COBIT, NIST and ISO 270001. But this is the first benchmark developed specifically for protecting health data. "It's tailored to protecting health information right out of the gate," Michael Wilson, vice president and chief information security officer of McKesson, the largest U.S. pharmaceutical distributor, told SCMagazineUS.com on Monday. "It's just a different sort of data. It's still structured [like other verticals], but there's a lot more of it in health care." The framework was created to improve adoption rates with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and increase patient confidence in the security of their information. It also arrives on the heels of the new $787 billion economic stimulus bill, about $20 billion of which is earmarked to encourage health care organizations to adopt electronic health records as a way to reduce the number of medical errors and save money. The stimulus bill, in itself, contains srict privacy and security regulations for patient information. The standards took about 18 months to devise and can be implemented by organizations of any size, according to HITRUST. "2009 will be a turning point for information security in the health care industry, when organizations will begin implementing the framework...and create a cascading effect that will impact and benefit the entire health care ecosystem," Daniel Nutkis, CEO of HITRUST, said in news release. Wilson said the framework also will enable companies such as McKesson to show their customers and business partners that they are taki

Woonsocket-based CVS Caremark Corp., the largest U.S. drugstore chain, has agreed to pay $2.25 million to settle federal charges that company employees compromised customer privacy by throwing prescription records and drug bottles into open trash bins. The Federal Trade Commission said its investigation with the Health and Human Services Department followed media reports that trash bins behind CVS pharmacies contained pill bottles bearing patient names, credit-card and insurance information, and Social Security numbers. The company also did not have adequate policies for disposing of that information, and did not sufficiently train employees to dispose of the information properly, the agencies said. The items that were not properly discarded included pill bottles, medication instruction sheets, computer order forms, payroll information, job applications and credit-card and insurance information. Those labels and forms contained personal information including Social Security numbers and credit card and insurance information, and in some cases, driver's license numbers and account numbers. Names of the patients' doctors were also included. The settlement "will restore appropriate privacy protections to tens of millions of people across the country," FTC chairman William Kovacic said in a statement. "It also sends a strong message" that organizations "are required to secure consumers' private information," he said.

Better to settle with the FTC than get your company's reputation as consumer-friendly (deserved or not) dragged through the court of public opinion.

Sears Holdings has agreed to settle allegations it collected personal data from customers without adequate disclosures, the Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday. The FTC had accused Sears Holdings, created in 2005 with the merger of Sears and Kmart, of paying online customers $10 to allow the company to track their online browsing. But the FTC said Sears also collected information on non-Sears sites, such as online bank statements, drug prescription records and emails. "The software would also track some computer activities that were not related to the Internet," the FTC said in a statement. Sears did disclose all it would monitor in a lengthy user license agreement, but the FTC argued it was not enough. "The complaint charges that Sears' failure to adequately disclose the scope of the tracking software's data collection was deceptive and violates the FTC Act," the FTC said in a statement. Sears did not immediately reply to two telephone calls and one email seeking a comment. Under the settlement, Sears is required to destroy the data collected and make future disclosures more prominent.

In New Jersey, and around the country, most doctors still rely on paper records for everything from writing prescriptions to keeping track of their patients' allergies. Only about 1.5 percent of U.S. hospitals have switched to an electronic records systems, and less than 8 percent have even a basic system, according to a recent study by the New England Journal of Medicine.

IT practices such as identity management, email and URL filtering, virus scanning and electronic monitoring of employees can get companies that do business globally into a heap of trouble if deployed without an understanding of global data privacy laws. The warning was one of several alarms raised in a presentation on global privacy best practices by Gartner Inc. analysts Arabella Hallawell and Carsten Casper at the recent Gartner Risk Management and Compliance Summit in Chicago. Always a thorny issue, the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) is made more complicated in a world where there is limited agreement on how best to do that. According to the Gartner analysts, the world is divided into three parts when it comes to data privacy laws: countries with strong, moderate or inadequate legislation. The European Union, under the European Union Directive on Data Protection, possesses the strongest privacy regulations, followed by Canada and Argentina; Australia, Japan and South Africa have moderate to strong, recent legislation; laws in China, India and the Philippines are the least effective or laxly enforced. The United States has the dubious distinction of occupying two categories -- the strong column, due to the 45 state breach notification laws on the books, and the weak column, because of the lack of a federal law. Even among the three categories, nuances abound. Under the European Union Directive, member countries enact their own principles into legislation, and some laws (like Italy's) are more stringent than the directive's standards. Russia's very recent law is modeled after the strong EU laws, but how it will be enforced remains questionable. And in the U.S., state breach notification laws vary, with Nevada and Massachusetts proposing the most prescriptive data privacy legislation to date.

Another test of who owns what data, what can be done with it and the power of State's Rights.

IMS Health (RX) has built a lucrative niche collecting data on which drugs physicians prescribe, then selling the information to pharmaceutical companies. But legislators in more than 20 states have questioned whether the company has a constitutional right to do so. The Supreme Court could shine a spotlight on this topic in the next few weeks if it decides to hear a closely watched case IMS has been fighting in New Hampshire. The court's ruling would quickly reverberate beyond the pharmaceutical industry, affecting virtually any business that uses information about consumer buying behavior to guide its sales strategies.