Fred Trotter

Microsoft often does the wrong thing. But that does not mean they have to. There are three requirements for behaving ethically as a PHR host.

You must release all of the sourcecode to your PHR under a license that qualifies as both “Free (as-in-Freedom-not-price) Software” and Open Source.
You must allow for the export of all data […]

I hope I have made my case that “patient privacy” is complex enough that merely “Recognize that patients have the right to medical privacy” is the ethical equivalent of saying “When considering the medical ethical issue of abortion , you must recognize that often women want to get pregnant and have a child.” This is […]

I have passed my CISSP certification, marking me as an Information Security Expert. I had to pass a complex test and demonstrate that I had three years of full-time security experience to become CISSP certified. I have a four year degree in Computer Science, and I have been trained in Information Warfare by the United […]

Has Microsoft committed to keeping the promises that it has already made? No, just the opposite. Their privacy policy concludes:“We may occasionally update this privacy statement”
Which means that when the commitments that Microsoft has made regarding HealthVault become inconvenient, they will simply change them.
Will the data that you enter into HealthVault be secure? Would my […]

Microsoft, of all the companies that might consider creating a PHR, is especially problematic. Microsoft has a long history of standards abuse.
Lets consider a parallel issue to the “personal health record”, personal email. I use gmail and have used yahoo mail in the past, but for this example lets pretend that I used Hotmail, a […]

(note: This is the first of my “week of HealthVault” articles.)
HealthVault, the new Personal Health Record (PHR) from Microsoft, along with Googles coming PHR offering, fail the seven generations test.
I did not come up with the idea of “seven generations”, pay attention the next time you go to the grocery store and you might […]

Sometimes I wrestle with how to communicate my feelings on the medical licensing. I view medical licensing as a moral issue. Some proprietary vendors get really offended by this view. Others see my point as I intended it, to place medical licensing in the moral sphere instead of the practical sphere. I recently posted over […]