By Stephen P. Wood Privacy, especially as it relates to healthcare and protecting sensitive medical information, is an important issue. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better know as HIPAA, is a legislative action that helps to safeguard personal medical information. This protection is afforded to individuals by the Privacy Rule, which dictates who…
By Mason Marks and Tiffany Li An earlier version of this article was published in STAT. The National Institutes of Health wants your DNA, and the DNA of one million other Americans, for an ambitious project called All of Us. Its goal — to “uncover paths toward delivering precision medicine” — is a good one.…
By Sara Gerke The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force two years ago but became directly applicable in all EU Member States only last week, aims to establish an equal level of protection for the rights and freedoms of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data in all EU Member States. Each of us has been inundated with…
By Mason Marks Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was reported that Facebook planned to partner with medical organizations to obtain health records on thousands of users. The plans were put on hold when news of the scandal broke. But Facebook doesn’t need medical records to derive health data from its users. It can use…
By Mason Marks The opioid crisis kills at least 91 Americans each day and has far-reaching social and economic consequences for us all. As lawmakers explore solutions to the problem, they should ensure that new regulations are based on scientific evidence and reason rather than emotion or political ideology. Though emotions should motivate the creation…
By Wendy Netter Epstein Earlier this month, CVS announced plans to buy Aetna— one of the nation’s largest health insurers—in a $69 billion deal. Aetna and CVS pitched the deal to the public largely on the promise of controlling costs and improving efficiency in their operations, which they say will inhere to the benefit of…
By Mason Marks In this brief essay, I describe a new type of medical information that is not protected by existing privacy laws. I call it Emergent Medical Data (EMD) because at first glance, it has no relationship to your health. Companies can derive EMD from your seemingly benign Facebook posts, a list of videos…
By Leslie Francis In honor of the occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of Bill of Health, this post reflects on the past five years of what’s generally known as “privacy” with respect to health information. The topic is really a giant topic area, covering a vast array of questions about the security and confidentiality of health…
By Leslie Francis It might come as a surprise to many in the United States that they may have no Fourth Amendment reasonable expectation of privacy in their physicians’ records when their physicians transfer these records to state agencies under state public health laws. Yet on July 27, the federal district court for the state…
By Mary A. Majumder, Christi J. Guerrini, Juli M. Bollinger, Robert Cook-Deegan, and Amy L. McGuire The 21st Century Cures Act was passed with support from both sides of the aisle (imagine that!) and signed into law by then-President Obama late last year. This ambitious legislation drives action in areas as diverse as drug and…
