By Chris Smith

The OCEAN User Group held its 15th annual Technical Conference last week and hosted in excess of 200 people who attended more than 30 educational sessions on the IBM i platform and related technologies.

Many entities are offering consumers a way to store their healthcare information, but are these pie-in-the-sky offerings anathemas to privacy?

By Maria DeGiglio 

Many entities--from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, to many insurance companies, to WebMD, Microsoft, and now Google Health--offer healthcare consumers (note: we are no longer patients; now we are consumers) the ability to store their personal health information online. This information, known as a personal health record (PHR), is maintained for individuals on secure Web sites and permits owners to organize their medical information and indicate who may access their information and how--whether read-only or the ability to add, modify, or delete information.