Susannah Fox

I help people navigate health and technology.

Susannah Fox

HIPAA’s Broken Promise

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If you hate HIPAA, it’s your lucky day. Paul Ohm is handing you ammunition in his article, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization.” His argument: our current information privacy structure is a house built on sand. “Computer scientists…have demonstrated they can often ‘reidentify’ or ‘deanonymize’ individuals hidden in anonymized data […]

Senator Ted Kennedy was an e-patient–Susannah Fox

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CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen makes a compelling case in her column today: How to get Kennedy-esque health care on your budget. Anyone with internet access can gather the information they need to make better health decisions, as e-Patient Dave and Karen Parles did, and refuse to take “no” for an answer, as Sen. Kennedy did.

Social Media’s Promise for Public Health

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Federal agencies can, and should, be the first responders to health questions. Social media can help. That’s my summary of presentations from last week’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media conference, where I had the sense, once again, of a tribal meeting, but this one had the urgency of war council. The enemy […]

Shared Kismet: Wikipedia and the NIH

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The National Institutes of Health hosted a Wikipedia Academy today to train scientists, communications staff, and other NIH staffers in how to contribute to what has become a top source for health information in the U.S. (For more details, please see the NIH press release, a Wikipedia project page, and a Wikimedia Blog post.) The […]