Health Privacy

About health privacy, World Privacy Forum key health privacy resources

The World Privacy Forum is extremely active in health privacy, with a long and successful track record of work in this area. We have done groundbreaking work in the area of medical identity theft, as well as substantive analysis and education on critical privacy aspects of health data such as medical research, genomics, and many other issues. 

Some of our most frequently accessed health privacy resources include:

* A Patient’s Guide to HIPAA

* Medical Identity Theft Page (resources, reports, more)

* Health privacy tagged materials 

* HIPAA tagged materials 

* Electronic Health Records tagged materials 

* Common Rule and Human Subject Research Protection tagged materials

* Genetic privacy tagged materials 

We have many more publications and resources. For a full list of topics and publications, see our key issues page.

See below for health privacy news and content by date.

WPF paper on collective privacy accepted to Privacy Law Scholar’s Conference

WPF is pleased to announce that Executive Director Pam Dixon’s paper on the topic of collective privacy was selected for inclusion at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference from a large and highly competitive field. The paper is now available at the PLSC website as a confidential download for conference attendees. PLSC provides privacy scholars the

WPF advises FDA and HHS on informed consent guidance for medical research

The World Privacy Forum filed detailed comments regarding draft guidance on privacy and medical research to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The proposed guidance, Facilitating Understanding in Informed Consent, is related to consent for human subject research (medical research) and is particularly important. Currently, models of consent are in the process of going digital, which has created a number of challenging problems to solve. In the comments, WPF had several recommendations to improve consent and privacy.

WPF comments to NIST regarding its differential privacy guidance

WPF submitted comments to the National Institute of Standards and Technology regarding its Draft Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees. The comments approach the NIST Draft Guidance from a policy perspective, and urged changes to some parts of the definitional language in the Draft Guidance. Key areas of the comments include: A discussion of the

WPF advises FTC regarding health data breach notification rule

The World Privacy Forum filed comments regarding the US Federal Trade Commission’s 2023 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking regarding Health Breach Notification. This marks the second set of comments WPF has filed, our first being in 2009 regarding the first iteration of the Health Breach Rule. The comments are technical, and focus on the fundamental challenges