By FRANK PASQUALE, JD

Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has quite a following among health lawyers. As an excerpt from the book explains,

Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells — taken without her knowledge — became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, her cells — known as “HeLa cells” — are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years.

If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons — as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Skloot tells the story of the Lacks family, which never shared in the prosperity based on the HeLa cells. This is old news for any property student familiar with Moore v. Regents, but it’s particularly poignant in this context.

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By Matthew Holt

OrganizedWisdom is one of the more innovative Health 2.0 content and search companies, and the dynamic duo of Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes just pulled off an interesting coup by getting OW's wisdom cards into the ubiquitous Readers' Digest magazines that fill every doctor's office.

I caught up with Steve and Unity and they told me about the deal, their new board member (ex Time-Warner CEO Jerry Levin) and what they're expecting to come next.

Interview with OrganizedWisdom

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI

Word is that House Republicans will attach an amendment to the latest federal spending bill that will cut-off funding for the health care bill.

The last Congress never finalized a budget for the current fiscal year—the feds have been operating under a series of continuing resolutions. The most recent one will expire on March 4th. If another resolution is not agreed to, much of the government has to shutdown.

House Republicans, under heavy pressure from their base, have decided to take the Democrats on over the new health care law by cutting all remaining funding for implementation of the law in the current 2010 fiscal year (October to October).

Democrats, under the same heavy pressure from their base to protect the bill, aren’t about to let them do that. While the Republicans can accomplish this in the House—and will next week—they don’t have the votes in the Senate and they don’t have the President’s pen.

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By PAUL LEVY

Is this a case of ethical blinders?

Today's New York Times has an important story about the ineffectiveness of removal of lymph nodes for certain women with breast cancer. That is a significant result of clinical research. But read this:

Experts say that the new findings, combined with similar ones from earlier studies, should change medical practice for many patients. Some centers have already acted on the new information. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan changed its practice in September, because doctors knew the study results before they were published.

And they felt no need to spread the word quickly to other hospitals and to breast cancer patient advocacy groups and help women across the world avoid the surgery and its after-effects? (As noted in the article, "It can cause complications like infection and lymphedema, a chronic swelling in the arm that ranges from mild to disabling.")

Paul Levy is the former President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center in Boston. For the past five years he blogged about his experiences in an online journal, Running a Hospital. He now writes as an advocate for patient-centered care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement at Not Running a Hospital.

By LISA SUENNEN

I’m really looking forward to this coming Friday, February 4th, as I get to moderate a panel on “The Impact of Health Reform on California.”  The panel, which was organized by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies is being held in Sacramento and will take place before a sold-out crowd of nearly 200, in large part because it has a meaty topic and some really top-notch participants, including:

• Diana Dooley
  Secretary, Health and Human Services Agency
• Cindy Ehnes
  Director, California Department of Managed Healthcare
• Paul Markovich
  Chief Operating Officer, Blue Shield of California
• Saumya Sutaria
  Director, McKinsey & Co.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (who I went to college with) and Congresswoman Doris Matsui will also make some remarks.

This should be a great event because each of the panelists has a pretty significant role to play in how the State of CA adopts and adapts to health reform, and there is a remarkable amount at stake.

Saul Bellow once said, “California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn’t really need.”  That may be true, but in our healthcare economy we can’t afford to amputate.

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By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

The internet can be a swamp of hackers, crackers, and hucksters attacking your systems for fun, profit and fraud.  Defending your data and applications against this onslaught is a cold war, requiring constant escalation of new techniques against an ever increasing offense.

Clinicians are mobile people.  They work in ambulatory offices, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, on the road, and at home.   They have desktops, laptops, tablets, iPhones and iPads.  Ideally their applications should run everywhere on everything.   That's the reason we've embraced the web for all our built and bought applications.   Protecting these web applications from the evils of the internet is a challenge.

Five years ago all of our externally facing web sites were housed within the data center and made available via network address translation (NAT)  through an opening in the firewall.   We performed periodic penetration testing of our sites.  Two years ago, we installed a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and proxy system.    We are now in the process of migrating all of our web applications from NAT/firewall accessibility to WAF/Proxy accessibility.

We have a few hundred externally facing web sites.  From a security view there are only two types, those that provide access to protected health information content and those that do not.   Fortunately more are in the latter than the former.

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By JEAN STANFORD, PETER MORK, PhD, and ARNON ROSENTHAL, PhD

The President’s Council of Scientific Advisors (PCAST) report on health care IT points out that “A patient cannot make meaningful privacy choices unless he or she understands the flows and uses of information and can therefore make informed choices. That is not the reality today… While face­to­face counseling on privacy choices should be available whenever choice is either required by law, policy or practice, most patients will probably educate themselves on the issues and make privacy choices through a web interface, where they will also be able to change their choices at any time… An important point is that, when patients have a meaningful opportunity to choose, a patient’s choices will be persistent, that is, continuing until changed. Most patients ideally will have elected privacy choices at a time when they are healthy and competent. This is truer to the principal of informed consent than is a rushed signature at thetime of a medical emergency, or when the patient’s physical or mental competency is compromised.”[i]

We have developed a proof of concept prototype (http://sourceforge.net/projects/kaironconsents/) for such a patient privacy preference management system that could be implemented nationwide.

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