By Michele Goodwin As the nation braces for possibly more Ebola cases, civil liberties should be considered, including patient privacy. As news media feature headline-grabbing stories about quarantines, let’s think about the laws governing privacy in healthcare. Despite federal laws enacted to protect patient privacy, the Ebola scare brings the vulnerability of individuals and the…
By Michelle Meyer Reuters broke the story on Friday, citing anonymous sources: The company is exploring creating online “support communities” that would connect Facebook users suffering from various ailments. . . . Recently, Facebook executives have come to realize that healthcare might work as a tool to increase engagement with the site. One catalyst: the…
By Leslie Francis [Cross-posted at HealthLawProfs blog.] Under HIPAA, patients’ spouses and other family members have certain rights to access health information. In an important guidance document in the wake of United States v. Windsor, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at HHS has clarified that “spouse” under HIPAA refers to legally married same-sex spouses, even if…
By Nicolas Terry In a post last week I compared Apple’s new mHealth App store rules with our classic regulatory models. I noted that the ‘Health’ data aggregation app and other apps using the ‘HealthKit’ API that collected, stored or processed health data would seldom be subject to the HIPAA Privacy and Security rules. There will…
By Nicolas Terry On September 9 Apple is hosting its ‘Wish We Could Say More’ event. In the interim we will be deluged with usually uninformed speculation about the new iPhone, an iWatch wearable, and who knows what else. What we do know, because Apple announced it back in June, is that iOS 8, Apple’s mobile…
By Nicolas Terry Sutter Health v. Superior Court, 2014 WL 3589699 (Cal. App. 2014), is a medical data breach class action case that raises questions beyond the specifics of the Californian Confidentiality of Medical Information Act. The stakes were high in Sutter — under the California statute medical data breach claims trigger (or should trigger!) nominal…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new opinion piece on NBCNews on the controversy over the case of Jessie Herald, in which he was offered a plea bargain that involved sterilization for a reduced sentencing. From the piece: Jessie Lee Herald was facing five years or more in prison after a crash in which police and prosecutors…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has authored a new opinion piece on Bioethics.net on the issue of “chipping” human beings. From the piece: There has been a great deal of fingerpointing, second-guessing and recrimination over the decision by the President to exchange five former Taliban leaders for the American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl. “You’ve just released five extremely dangerous people,…
By Leslie Francis Cross-post from HealthLawProf Blog The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has issued a report intended to be a technological complement to the recent White House report on big data. This PCAST report, however, is far more than a technological analysis—although as a description of technological developments it is wonderfully accessible, clear…
By Timo Minssen In a recent blog I discussed the benefits and potential draw-backs of a new “EU Regulation on clinical trials on medicinal products for human use,” which had been adopted by the European Parliament and Council in April 2014. Parallel to these legislative developments, the drug industry has responded with its own initiatives providing for varying degrees…
