As healthcare organizations continue to collect more and more patient data across the spectrum of care, there is a rapidly growing need to access and use this t

Linked Data  in Healthcare     and Life Sciences                                                             James G. Boram Kim                                …

Medical privacy is a high-stakes game, in both human and financial terms, given the multibillion-dollar market for anonymized medical data — but existing legal protections are full of holes.

Major flaws in two massive trials of deworming pills show the importance of sharing data — which most scientists don't do.

“State healthcare laws are all over the place; it is fun; it’s why we’re all here,” said Web Hull, CIPP/G, CIPP/US, privacy, data protection, compliance advisor

Spoilers: they're not. Default passwords on gadgetry like copiers/printers/scanners is a weak point for network attacks.

The Institute of Medicine takes a step in the right direction but we should move even faster  The Institute of Medicine (IOM), a venerable American institution that seeks to provide authoritative recommendations to decision makers and the public, released a report last month on Sharing Clinical Trial Data .1 The report is a welcome codification of guiding principles and frameworks. It reinforces many arguments for data sharing and urges that stakeholders “should foster a culture in which data sharing is the expected norm.”1 The IOM joins many other organizations, including drug companies,2 3 the European Medicines Agency,4 the National Institutes of Health,5 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,6 in making clear that study reporting and data sharing in medical research are imperative and the questions ahead are how, not whether.  The general support for data sharing in the IOM document will be familiar to The BMJ ’s readers, as this journal has long advocated the importance of transparency in scientific research and the need to report results and share data.7 The report provides what should be easily achievable recommendations for the research community. The committee called for data sharing only for new trials, though it urged consideration of sharing older studies. It stated that 18 months could elapse …

Big-data technology will eventually underpin the healthcare system, though to what extent and what that means to patients are questions needing to be asked.

Half of all clinical trials are never published, and Big Pharma wants to keep it that way.

The recent book The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration is not to be leafed through lightly. The volume reproduces 19th-century imag ...

An investigation into how patient outcomes are assessed in clinical trials has revealed a worrying lack of consistency, raising concerns about funding being wasted on the acquisition of poor quality data.

By Fred Trotter Who owns a patient's health information? ·The patient to whom it refers? ·The health provider that created it? ·The IT specialist who has the greatest control over it? The notion of ownership is inadequate for health information. For instance, no one has an absolute right to...

A respected Canadian medical journal that was sold to offshore owners last year is now printing scientific junk for hire, but still trading on its original…

Data included Social Security numbers as well as names, birth dates.

The Public Health Research Data Forum brought together more than 20 funders of global health research to support ways of sharing health research data.

Editorial: Nature and the BMJ, like all serious scientific journals, rely on peer review to establish the authority of the papers they publish, and peer review, it appears, is less reliable than it sounds

The Havasupai people, who live in the Grand Canyon, had claimed that university researchers misused their DNA.