Health Privacy: Journal special issue

[Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

I hope the list will forgive me a short advertisement, but v 4 no 3/4
of the Health Informatics Journal, which I edited, is devoted to
safety and privacy in clinical information systems. The web page is at

	http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/hij/

Papers include a report of a Malaysian project to centralise all
health records in one database; analyses of the information that
emergency room physicians actually need, and what health smartcards
are likely to provide; a comparison of health data security policies
proposed in the UK, Germany, Sweden and Canada; a report on the
implementation of the UK policy in a hospital system; several papers
on organsiational issues and physical security; a survey of diabetics'
attitudes to the collection of information to monitor the quality of
care under the St Vincent declaration; details of a de-identification
system developed to sanitize prescription data from pharmacies before
sale to drug companies; a design for pseudonymous health credit cards
that could be used to support insurance without compromising privacy;
and two papers on unique healthcare identifiers.

This might be particularly valuable given the state of play in the US
at present. When a lobbyist tries to shoot down a privacy proposal by
saying `That will never work' it can be useful to reply `it works fine
in UK hospitals / German cancer registries / Danish universities'.

Ross