Partner Paul Karlsgodt is quoted in a July 25, 2023, HealthITSecurity article titled “How Did This Happen? Understanding the Issue of Third-Party Tracking Tech in Healthcare.”
Journalists discovered in June 2022 that “a third of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America had the Meta Pixel installed on their websites, which allegedly sent a packet of data to Facebook whenever a visitor clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment,” according to the article.
Indeed, some health systems were found to have Meta Pixel operating inside password-protected patient portals and “sending patient names, medication information, and appointment details to Facebook.”
With the number of lawsuits on this issue climbing, the safest approach for health systems “is to remove all tracking and analytics technologies ... that might cause web browsing data to be sent to a third party that is not a business associate,” Karlsgodt told HealthITSecurity.