Since the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians have seen a large and sustained influx in patient portal messages, significantly contributing to clinician burnout. To the best of our knowledge, there are no large-scale public patient portal messages corpora researchers can use to build tools to optimize clinician portal workflows. Informed by our ongoing work with a regional hospital, this study introduces an LLM-powered framework for configurable and realistic patient portal message generation. Our approach leverages few-shot grounded text generation, requiring only a small number of de-identified patient portal messages to help LLMs better match the true style and tone of real data. Clinical experts in our team deem this framework as HIPAA-friendly, unlike existing privacy-preserving approaches to synthetic text generation which cannot guarantee all sensitive attributes will be protected. Through extensive quantitative and human evaluation, we show that our framework produces data of higher quality than comparable generation methods as well as all related datasets. We believe this work provides a path forward for (i) the release of large-scale synthetic patient message datasets that are stylistically similar to ground-truth samples and (ii) HIPAA-friendly data generation which requires minimal human de-identification efforts.

Google secretly gathered millions of patient records across 21 states on behalf of a health care provider, in an effort dubbed "Project Nightingale," reports The Wall Street Journal. Neither the provider's doctors nor patients were made aware of the effort, according to the report. The Wall Street Journal's Rob Copeland wrote that the data amassed in the program includes "lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, complete with patient names and dates of birth," and that as many as 150 Google employees may have had access to the data. The New York Times corroborated much of the report later in the day, writing that "dozens of Google employees" may have access to sensitive patient data, and that there are concerns that some Google employees may have downloaded some of that data. But Google tells The Verge that despite the surprise, it's standard industry practice for a health care provider to share highly sensitive health records with tech workers under an agreement like the kind it signed -- one that narrowly allows Google to build tools for that health care provider by using the private medical data of its patients, and one that doesn't require patients to be notified, the company claims.

Google secretly gathered millions of patient records across 21 states on behalf of a health care provider, in an effort dubbed "Project Nightingale," reports The Wall Street Journal. Neither the provider's doctors nor patients were made aware of the effort, according to the report. The Wall Street Journal's Rob Copeland wrote that the data amassed in the program includes "lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, complete with patient names and dates of birth," and that as many as 150 Google employees may have had access to the data. The New York Times corroborated much of the report later in the day, writing that "dozens of Google employees" may have access to sensitive patient data, and that there are concerns that some Google employees may have downloaded some of that data. But Google tells The Verge that despite the surprise, it's standard industry practice for a health care provider to share highly sensitive health records with tech workers under an agreement like the kind it signed -- one that narrowly allows Google to build tools for that health care provider by using the private medical data of its patients, and one that doesn't require patients to be notified, the company claims.

PHR ( personal health records) apps became a major trend for all healthcare aware - advanced mobile users in the past few years, PHR apps to provide very easy and accessible centralised tool for patients to keep their medical records secure, simple to update, and review. PHR key concept is to be managed by the patient himself who should the keep marinating and updating his records. Security is a the major factor for the PHR app, and some Apps are promoting sets of security measures to ensure they protect their users privacy. Some apps are providing data encryption for the data. However the most basic and required feature for PHR apps which should not be ignored by developers is: App Locking, The app has to be locked by the user either by a password or by fingerprint.

The world's most powerful technology companies have a vision for the future of healthcare. You'll still go to your doctor's office, sit in a waiting room, and explain your problem to someone in a white coat. But instead of relying solely on their own experience and knowledge, your doctor will consult an algorithm that's been trained on the symptoms, diagnoses, and outcomes of millions of other patients. Instead of a radiologist reading your x-ray, a computer will be able to detect minute differences and instantly identify a tumor or lesion. AI systems like these, currently under development by companies including Google and IBM, can't read textbooks and journals, attend lectures, and do rounds--they need millions of real life examples to understand all the different variations between one patient and another.