Once COVID-19 hit, the demand for mental health services skyrocketed, and with in-person care suspended, many turned to digital services — which led to a disturbing breach of data privacy.
The Duke Sanford School of Public Policy conducted a data brokerage study that found sensitive mental and physical health information was being collected, aggregated, bought, and sold by digital mental health service apps. And those services, in many cases, were not bound by HIPAA regulations.
The list of buyers of the personal health information is vast that includes banks and other financial institutions, US law enforcement agencies, advertising firms, insurance providers — and scammers.
Some digital health service platforms priced the health data of its customers between $200 and $5,000, while others offered subscriptions that doled out information monthly for $75,000 to $100,000.
So what's up for sale? The study found that some services were selling data on anonymous customers, others sold information that included a person's age, sex, race, postal code, and mental health status.
Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission filed an order with the Justice Department against GoodRx, a leader in American healthcare and operator of a telemedicine platform, for illegally sharing user information with advertising behemoths like Facebook and Google. The company has since agreed to pay a $1.5 million fine. If the suit is honored in court, it would ban GoodRx from sharing sensitive personal data with third parties.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday warned that a deadly fungus called Candida auris (C. auris) is spreading at an "alarming rate" in the U.S. healthcare facilities.
Karuna Therapeutics' top-experimental schizophrenia drug significantly reduced symptoms in a late-stage trial but there were concerns that it could cause hypertension in patients.
One of television's most successful writers made a big donation to the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to help underserved community members gain the skills to become health care professionals.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom over the weekend announced that the state has secured a contract with CIVCA to make $30 insulin available to all who need it. He also announced that the state will start manufacturing Naloxone, an emergency medication used to rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
The global bottled water industry is booming, and it's coming at a steep environmental cost, according to the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
