Not only do company founders have to deal with patent trolls, but find their way through patent thickets. Patent thickets are overlapping patent rights through which developers must find a safe, defensible space for their technology. This article introduces this concept to our readers and outlines a strategy to deal with it–in early days, and not sticking one’s head in the sand as this Editor has encountered. What may surprise you in reading this excellent article is that the author, Dolly J. Krishnaswamy, is not an experienced litigator, but a law student at NYU while working as a Project Manager/Law... Continue Reading
Search Results for hacking
A ‘mobilized’ artificial pancreas breakthrough?
...the 20 patients monitored were initially presented at June’s American Diabetes Association’s annual scientific meeting and published in the July edition of the journal Diabetes Care (PDF does not require subscription). The system was designed by an international team: Sansum Diabetes Research Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., University of Padova in Italy and the University of Montpellier in France. Tests continued with summer campers and the integration of Bluetooth LE into the connectivity system. Mobihealthnews article. But can this small miracle of a system be hacked–and can providers be held accountable? This scary thought of ‘harm or death by hacking’,... Continue Reading
One step further towards smartphone-based health apps becoming autonomous
...the smartphones is called in the future that is processing and transmitting information, and there have been several recent warnings on malicious hacking of medical devices, so it won’t be happening any time soon. However, given the way so many medical processes that began with manual involvement have moved steadily towards automation, from ECG to Point-Of-Care-Testing, hopefully one day these problems will be solved. One pointer, reported in iMedicalApps, is three trials currently underway using smartphones to control artificial pancreases to manage diabetes. The smartphones in this case are completely locked down and are only used for the decision-taking process... Continue Reading
New York, New York, it’s a health tech town (Part 2)
...gray ripstop-like ShieldSak has a ‘Faraday cage’ which prevents hacking and reading of contents and cards within. Website. CEWeek 2013/Digital Health Summit Four floors up, I sat with Tal Givoly, CEO and Oren Fuerst, PhD, Executive Chairman, of startup health information company Medivizor. Their ‘job to be done’ is to personalize the tidal wave of available health information for those with chronic and serious diseases. For this group, the current state is 1) too much information, 2) hard to interpret research and 3) difficult to determine if the information is applicable/relevant/reliable to their chronic condition or disease. By signing up,... Continue Reading
Healthcare data breaches show 25% fraud risk: study
...hospitals and large providers. HCA Holdings, the largest US for-profit hospital chain, is testing Eye Controls’ system at their private clinics in London. Medical ID theft is also a problem in the UK, with ‘shame-based theft’ (to conceal an illness) and private billing the given reasons. Iris scanning units cost about $200-300–a moderate cost. According to the World Privacy Forum, iris scanning will rule out hacking, but not ‘inside jobs’–progress of a sort. But an open question is how this integrates into current EHRs. Iris Scans Seen Shrinking $7 Billion Medical Data Breach (Bloomberg) Editor’s note: The Gimlet Eye is…envious.... Continue Reading
Quantified Selfing: security and statistics
It was inevitable, but now there’s concern about your QS data’s security and hacking. With healthcare organizations having security breaches rather routinely (wander over to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse), the Federal Government routinely fighting off ‘denial of service’ assaults and Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Dropbox joining the hacked club, how long will it be before a fitness or telehealth company is breached? Or hospitals/providers which use insecure messaging, Skype and data files? Or those 600-odd practice EHRs? From the article, Avi Rubin, the director of the Health and Medical Security Lab at Johns Hopkins University: “Any system that consists in... Continue Reading
Top data breaches of 2012
The year should not conclude without at least one last look at data breaches. This article from HealthWorks Collective samples three but they are ‘doozys’–in the millions and all hacking. Over at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, if you select only healthcare and tick all breaches save payment card fraud, there are 207–with the most serious belonging to Alere [TA 30 Nov], Gulf Coast Healthcare Services and the California Department of Healthcare Services all with breaches including SSI and over 10,000 records. Not a good leading indicator for 2013.... Continue Reading
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