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.

Video: Robots and remote doctor visits — telemedicine updates (CES 2015, interview, Double Robotics)

Telemedicine is rapidly advancing. The Mayo Clinic, Kaiser, and other health providers are already in testing to see how doctors can use sleek, rolling telemedicine robots to conduct remote patient interactions and allow for better visual diagnosing. In this video, the company Double Robotics walks us through how the robots look, move, and operate (via an iPad) and how they are already being used in clinical settings today.

Video: The New World of Health Sensors

This video is part of our Health Technology series which explores emerging and important health technologies Health sensors — devices that can detect blood pressure and other bio readings — have advanced tremendously in the past few years. While many are familiar with fitness devices that monitor activities such as number of footsteps, new and very sophisticated

Student Privacy 101: Health Privacy in Schools –What law applies?

Schools increasingly provide students with more health services. Health clinics, counselors on site, administration of drugs, and vaccinations are among the types of healthcare offered on school campuses ranging from kindergarten through graduate school. Given that schools may have sensitive health information, what law covers health record privacy for school records? The answer is important. It is also messy, because two laws can apply to this information. In some cases, no privacy law applies to the health records.