Well, the hour is late, and while sunk deep in our winter darkness, let's try to find some inner light, and spend a moment think of THREE GOOD THINGS™️!
🏥 I love my #telehealth care team, total game changers, all of them.
🍲 Butternut #squash stew that The Domestic Partner made me for while he's away.
When it gets dark at 4PM, bedtime kind of sneaks up on you! While we're letting go of the stress of the day, let's do some #gratitude and think of THREE GOOD THINGS™️!
💊 Painlessly renewed my #anxiety meds prescription (#telehealth is a game changer).
:blobcatheart: One of my parents' new cats has decided he is a lap cat.
The potential of #telehealth to improve health outcomes and reap astounding health care cost savings is really beginning to dawn on folks
Here's a good article here published in the Barn Raiser that focuses on the study we at ILSR did with the Southern Rural Black Women's Initiative (SRBWI)
Of course, telehealth is only possible if everyone has access to robust, reliable high-speed #Internet
"A pilot program at Texas Tech University has the potential to solve many of those concerns facing rural health care in West Texas. And the program is getting a boost from the Texas Legislature.
The program...provides emergency telemedicine medical services and telehealth services in rural areas by installing secure video calls and wireless patient monitoring in ambulances already in transit to an emergency room."
Last RT - many mental health providers I know (myself included, though less often nowadays) use zoom for clinical work/meetings/teletherapy. We’ve been told by the company itself, by the health insurance industry, and by our agencies that it’s HIPAA compliant and safe/ confidential to use.
Is anyone out there talking about or able to explain the implications of the TOS change for this use case? #socialwork#telehealth#zoom#HIPAA
Global venture funding for digital health start-ups remains mired at low levels, as the number of investment deals in the second quarter of 2023 dropped to its lowest level in eight years.
A therapist on another list asked if anyone had experience with hipaalink.net televideo service.
This looks like a promising small company with some neat features at only $9.95 per month. See below first however. I really don’t like that Facebook Connect is being contacted from the client’s browser when they login!
I spent a lot of time fighting to sign-up (had to change my settings to see their Captcha challenges). More of a problem – there was a very basic malfunction in the password selection process. Some “special characters” (you have to have one in the password) would not work (+ and #). I eventually got “-” to work. I got an almost immediate call-back when I sent a message about trouble picking a password (bug in our system, thank you for finding it, our programmers are fixing “special characters” this evening).
Did eventually set-up a 30-day free trial. So I can further tests later if I want to.
I noticed that https://hipaalink.net/<mysite> works, but https://www.hipaalink.net/<mysite> does not – another simple thing for their programming team to fix. (Older people are very used to “www” in front of everything, so this redirect should function.)
I kinda feel like I ought to be charging for debugging services.
I have not actually tried out video sessions yet. I’ve just run Privacy Badger and Ghostery browser plug-ins in both Opera and Firefox. Results:
CLIENT LOGIN PAGE: Privacy Badger: www.googletagmanager.com – cookies blocked fonts.gstatic.com – cookies blocked
Ghostery: Facebook Connect – BLOCKED! Google Tag Manager – allowed
CLIENT IN-SESSION: Privacy Badger: www.googletagmanager.com – cookies blocked fonts.gstatic.com – cookies blocked
Ghostery: Facebook Connect – BLOCKED! Google Tag Manager – allowed
Ghostery: Google Analytics – “tracking not detected” it says Google Tag Manager – allowed Google APIs – allowed Google Static – allowed
THERAPIST IN-SESSION: (The same) Privacy Badger: www.googletagmanager.com – cookies blocked fonts.gstatic.co – cookies blocked
Ghostery:
Google Analytics – “tracking not detected” it says Google Tag Manager – allowed Google APIs – allowed Google Static – allowed
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It’s necessary for some cookies and tracking to the functioning of a website. Privacy Badger and Ghostery are both detecting some of this from Google libraries which they choose to allow. I don’t have enough security engineering knowledge to know if these are harmless or not. I do know they are very common on most websites. Yet – Privacy Badger says they are blocking some cookies…
Facebook should not be contacted on the client side! I don’t know what Ghostery is blocking from being sent to Facebook, but this should not be on a HIPAA site. The connection between therapist and client seemed at first glance to work fine with Facebook blocked. I will discuss this with Hipaalink.net before I test it with actual clients. For now I give them the benefit of the doubt. I am told by a computer engineer that Facebook supplies some code libraries (like Google) which websites can use – maybe this is not intentional tracking, just their developers needing to fix this?
There is more tracking taking place on the home page and more public sections of the website than inside the login and televideo areas. So some effort to decrease tracking has been made for actual clients. I see different trackers on the public areas of the website today than I did when I first checked on 7/24/23.
It’s a maybe… But at $9.95 per month hipaalink.net could be a nice option if they clean up minor tracking concerns. Again, I have not tested the video yet.
My interpretation of this article is that hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, etc. need to get links and repost icons for Facebook, Twitter, etc. OFF their websites. If you work for a big institution -- talk to your marketing team as they are used to doing this routinely. If you are a small provider, look at your website -- especially if you created it years ago back when no one thought of the problems and you just wanted some traffic.
TITLE: FTC, HHS warn health providers not to use tracking tech in websites, apps
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent a joint letter to about 130 hospital systems and telehealth providers Thursday, warning of security risks posed by tracking technologies such as the Meta/Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics.
<https://therecord.media/apps-website-tracking-healthcare-ftc-hhs-warning>
#security #healthcare #doctors #itsecurity #hacking #doxxing #psychotherapy #securitynews #psychotherapist #mentalhealth #psychiatry #hospital #socialwork #datasecurity #webbeacons #cookies #HIPAA #privacy #datanalytics #healthcaresecurity #healthitsecurity #patientrecords #infosec @infosec@a.gup.pe #telehealth #netneutrality #socialengineering #marketing #seo #therapy
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist@a.gup.pe @psychotherapists@a.gup.pe @psychology@a.gup.pe @socialpsych@a.gup.pe @socialwork@a.gup.pe @psychiatry@a.gup.pe
@infosec@a.gup.pe #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare
Google Analytics is now a topic of conversation on the Baltimore Therapist listserv.
Your point about classism is well taken.
QUESTION: Am I correct in assuming that Google Analytics is likely to be harvesting client-side data and storing it? Asking for an educated guess as we might not know...
For the less-than-tech-saavy medical professionals and therapists in the room -- what log analyzers might they ask for when they speak to their marketing and IT teams about this issue?
“We are having less and less people graduate from medical school becoming doctors. Of course, those are being supplemented by what we refer to as mid-level providers ... which is also great, but our providers aren’t matching the rate of individuals surviving. We have to create the efficiencies. We have no choice. We have to use technology to do the best we can, and online communities are part of that.” –Denzil Coleman
Doxy is technically HIPAA compliant according to them and I can’t PROVE otherwise.
In October 2021 – logging in as a CLIENT – I traced (via Pihole and the Lightbeam Firefox plug-in) their website having my web browser contact connections to Google (multiple), Youtube (multiple), Facebook, Doubleclick, Hotjar, Mixpanel, and Segment ad networks/trackers/data aggregators. Heavy additional use of outside support tools from Google, Amazon (their web hosting provider), Cloudflare, Cloudfront, and other outside supporting services.
There was just no excuse for that from a company only providing medical telehealth.
Since then Doxy seems to call on fewer outside supporting services, and last I looked (April 2022) they ran their data tracking services through one specific company – which could then redistribute data to all the above companies. Or not.
The devil here is in what constitutes Protected Health Information (PHI). In 2022 Doxy privacy policies discussed only collecting “anonymized” data and no PHI. Sounds great. However, please see:
This HHS and OCR guidance includes the sorts of 3rd party tracking technologies DOXY is likely referring to in their privacy policies.
Then of course, there is this: Yes, someone really did name their service Doxy.me (“Doc See Me” according to the company). There are several double meanings here. Doxx or doxxing – hacker slang for spreading sensitive private information all over the Internet to defame someone. Webster’s Dictionary – Doxy – a prostitute. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doxy
No disrespect intended to sex workers in the use of the possible slur “prostitute” here.
Zoom Video and Zoom Info are TWO DIFFERENT companies. Sorry everyone.
Still not a bad idea to get out of their database however.
This is Zoom's privacy policy. It is an amazing piece of legal engineering granting them the rights to buy, sell, and gather just about any data about business users they want -- including listing you in a Business or Professional Profile (the "directory"):
<https://www.zoominfo.com/about-zoominfo/privacy-policy>
This is their form to opt-out of all tracking in their database which they use to sell your information to 3rd parties. Somewhat ironically, this page won't work unless you turn-off Privacy Badger and Ghostery web browser plug-ins:
<https://www.zoominfo.com/privacy-center/update/remove>
If you use Zoom at work through a business account and don't wish to be listed, consider opting out. They are also collecting information from around the Web outside of Zoom apparently to help build out your profile.
#psychology #neurology #socialwork #psychiatry @psychology@a.gup.pe @socialwork@a.gup.pe @psychiatry@a.gup.pe #mentalhealth #psychotherapists @psychotherapists@a.gup.pe #cookies #tracking #hacking #3rdpartytrackers #HIPAA #privacy #dataprivacy #webbeacons #videoconference #televideo #telehealth #zoom #databrokers
Interesting study on demographic characteristics of people who choose #telehealth versus in-clinic medication #abortion
“The authors found that 22.7% of patients overall chose telehealth over in-clinic medication abortion, and that these patients were more likely to be older, non-White, native English speakers, live farther from the clinic, and have had a prior abortion.”