Health IT -- The Health IT Standards Committee will be meeting tomorrow, August 20, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Washington DC. Those interested in this meeting can participate in person, or via the phone and web. The privacy and security workgroup will report at 1:30 pm Eastern. Location and call-in information is available at the HHS web site.
Public comments re: health data breaches -- The World Privacy Forum filed comments with the Department of Health and Human Services today regarding the HITECH Act guidance that HHS published along with a request for comments. The Forum urged the Department to tighten its proposed guidance, and to add more protections, oversight, and rules for "limited data set" breaches.
National Health Information Network (NHIN) -- The National Health Information Network timeline and chronology that the World Privacy Forum maintains has been updated. Materials from the April/May public forum in Dallas are now online and linked, as are key upcoming events regarding the NHIN. Notably, in September the nine existing NHIN trial implementation projects that have been running and exchanging health data in California, North Carolina, New York, and other states are set to be demonstrated in Washington DC. These demonstrations are pivotal for the NHIN and how it takes shape going forward.
Disclosure of the requested information to our organization is in the public interest because it will contribute significantly to public understanding of the NHIN Cooperative and its workgroups. The subject of the requested information will directly illuminate government activities for which information is unavailable otherwise. As far as we can tell, information regarding the NHIN Cooperative Workgroups, a topic of vital public interest, have not been made generally available to the public.
NHIN update -- The National Health Information Network, or NHIN, is part of a major undertaking to digitize and network the health care sector. From electronic health records to multi-state health information hubs, the U.S. government's goal is to modernize and move health care information from paper to digital. The Department of Health and Human Services is the primary mover behind this initiative, which is complex and multi-faceted. The World Privacy Forum keeps a chronology of NHIN events as a public service. The NHIN timeline has been updated to reflect changes in AHIC, a group that is charged in part with ensuring privacy and confidentiality in the NHIN and other aspects of health care modernization. AHIC is set to transition to a "public-private partnership," a move that will need to be watched closely to ensure robust consumer involvement.
AHIC - National Health Information Network -- The American Health Information Community Workgroup on Confidentiality, Privacy and Security requested public feedback regarding its working hypothesis. WPF responded to the request with public comments encouraging the adoption of a unified policy architecture and encouraging AHIC to focus on enforcement mechanisms that are intended to directly benefit consumers. WPF also encouraged AHIC to look comprehensively at the demands a new national electronic health exchange network will make on privacy in the health care sector.
The American Health Information Community Workgroup on Confidentiality, Privacy and Security requested public feedback regarding its working hypothesis. WPF responded to the request with public comments encouraging the adoption of a unified policy architecture and encouraging AHIC to focus on enforcement mechanisms that are intended to directly benefit consumers. WPF also encouraged AHIC to look comprehensively at the demands a new national electronic health exchange network will make on privacy in the health care sector.
National Health Information Network -- Recently, the first live prototypes of the NHIN were demonstrated in Washington, D.C. This was a milestone event in the development of the planned network. The National Health Information Network is an ambitious project the U.S. government undertook in 2004 to digitize and network patient health records across the nation. This project raises challenging confidentiality, privacy, and security issues.
Medical privacy | HIPAA -- Five groups joined the World Privacy Forum in asking for changes to be made to a proposed rule on how medical healthcare claims attachments are handled electronically. The World Privacy Forum and the EFF, EPIC, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy Activism and U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) asked that physicians be given more control over what parts of health records they send electronically to insurance companies, that psychotherapy notes not be included when sending health records for insurance payment, and that the HIPAA Privacy Rule be rigorously applied to scanned health records.
Medical privacy -- The World Privacy Forum testified before the National Committee on Vital Health Statistics in August regarding the importance of patient choice in the area of Electronic Health Records. The testimony stressed the importance of building security, patient privacy, and choice into EHRs and any form of the proposed National Health Information Network (NHIN).
The World Privacy Forum has been particularly interested in developments related to EHRs and the NHIN. Given the impetus of the 2004 Executive Order [1] mandating forward movement in these areas, and the broad impact digitized medical records will potentially have on patients and on the healthcare sector, the World Privacy Forum believes that the decisions this Committee and others shaping these efforts arrive at will be of lasting importance. Given the transition of many parts of our society from analog to digital, it is crucial to ask what this digitization will look like and to carefully examine and discuss what form EHRs and related systems should take in regards to patient choice, privacy, and security.
The World Privacy Forum and the Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted comments in response to the U.S. government's "Request for Information" about its plan to digitize all patient medical records and create an electronic "National Health Information Network" or NHIN. The comments urge caution in designing the NHIN and call for the government to build privacy, security, and open source technologies into the system from the beginning of the project.