NYT had an overview of Walgreen's struggle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/business/a-once-avid-ally-... "The Wall Street Journal reported that Walgreens was so eager to cement the relationship that it lent Theranos money, acquired warrants to buy Theranos stock and skipped its usual due diligence when evaluating a pharmacy partner."

"The Walgreens executives responsible for the Theranos deal, including Mr. Wasson, as well as the chief financial officer and the president of the company’s pharmacy unit, have all been replaced, forced out in 2014 by activist investors after Walgreens acquired the European drugstore chain Alliance Boots."

According to the last paragraph, they're still expanding.

"Last week, Siemens delivered lab equipment to a Theranos facility in the Harrisburg, Pa., area, according to the person familiar with the matter. The person said Theranos is preparing to open there what would be the company’s third lab."

I'm still not willing to bet everybody involved won't come out fantastically rich.

When I was in the business, we built stuff more or less to order. You don't want to warehouse a bunch of machines that cost you almost $100k each to build.

I mean it's utilitarian attitude on the surface, but the usefulness of medicine will be significantly degraded for everyone if patient records become public records.

Huh? The reason why doctor-patient confidentiality exists is to encourage people to seek treatment without fear of embarrassment or retaliation.

http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/nebraska/demographi...

It would if you reported "6 of 836 were HIV+ on Tuesday. The next day, a new couple moved into town. On Wednesday, 7 of 838 were HIV+." I don't think the aggregated data that is contemplated here is released on nearly that frequency.

Actually, giving a year of a winter/summer sport-related accident already provides a shorter window for when the accident has occurred. So should all case reports about such be giving at least a two year long window?

I'm quite aware of what is acceptable to release in a medical context; this was not that.

Most of the people who are replying negatively to my comments are misinterpreting my position: either suggesting that I implied there was a HIPAA violation, or that I think medical research data should be suppressed. Neither of those is true.

I'm sure you'll be able to cite the regulation that was broken, then.

[0] 45 CFR 164.514(b)(2)(i)(C)

[1] http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/institutional_review_board/hi... [2] https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Hospital-Inpatient-Dischar...

Elements of date other year, what must be removed to meet the blanket, by element test, means both month and date must be removed.

The alternate standard, which is typically used by large scale releases, is review by a professional expert (the specific expertise and determination is in the reg I cited) to validate that they aren't reidentifiable.

Your first link is not what you describe, it's a description of the definition of a limited data set under HIPAA, which can be disclosed for research, public health, and health care operations purposes. It notes that it can include full dates, and also explicitly notes that it is explicitly not considered deidentified, but is still PHI under HIPAA.

Your second link is unrelated to the first, and does contain day of week and year, but I don't see month. In any case, it's the kind of release from the kind of organization that is likely to have professional on staff and not rely on the blanket, by-element deidentification standard. That's not true of most practices and practitioners.

Your second link also says a limited dataset is considered PHI and can only be shared with third party under certain conditions and with a data use agreement.

medicine and all its research needs to be open, people have no privacy anywhere else, and to keep insisting on it for medical data is only allowing governments and huge corporations to take advantage of our lack of knowledge about drug affects etc..

the major reason there is even a debate about vaccines is because of this weird belief that we need to keep medical records siloed from researchers and the public when this information is probably of the highest value to us as a society.

but instead we just post everything else about ourselves on the Internet and those things can actually be used to hurt or segregate us from knowledge that will help us overall.

one of those weird things I've never understood about society's ability to be completely distracted from its own self interest.