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.
The European Commission has proposed the creation of a new European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, HERA. WPF provided comments regarding the proposal, urging the Commission to ensure from the outset that HERA will fulfill its mission with a focus on data interoperability and will include specific data governance and protection measures that will analyze
This summer, the World Privacy Forum served as a member of the World Health Organization’s External Expert Group on Data Principles. We are pleased to announce that WHO has now published its updated data principles and data sharing policy, as of October 2020. While there are additional items that WPF would like to address in
The COVID-19 pandemic strained the U.S. health ecosystem in numerous ways, including putting pressure on the HIPAA privacy and security rules. The Department of Health and Human Services adjusted the privacy and security rules for the pandemic through the use of statutory and administrative HIPAA waivers. While some of the adjustments are appropriate for the emergency circumstances, there are also some meaningful and potentially unwelcome privacy and security consequences. At an appropriate time, the use of HIPAA waivers as a response to health care emergencies needs a thorough review. This report sets out the facts, identifies the issues, and proposes a roadmap for change.
WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon will be presenting at an OECD and Global Privacy Assembly workshop on the risks, challenges, and potential solutions regarding the intersection of COVID-19 and the uses of identity in a global public health crisis. Event details: COVID-19 and privacy virtual Workshop on “The road to recovery: Lessons learned and challenges ahead”, hosted
The Department of Health and Human services has announced major changes for hospitals’ COVID-19 data reporting processes. HHS has also made changes to the types of data that hospitals must report, expanding the data collection. This includes new information requests for disaggregated information about adult and pediatric patients, to name a few of the changes. The reporting requirements do contain patient flows, but there are still unknown aspects to the new COVID-19 reporting requirements regarding individual-level data and certain privacy considerations.
