By Deven McGraw, Director, Health Privacy Project, Center for Democracy & Technology
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As part of our role as regulatory/assurance consultants to Project HealthDesign, my Manatt colleagues and I are looking to identify “cross-cutting policy issues” that are either currently impacting your use of observations of daily living (ODLs) to enhance patient care, or that may create obstacles to more widespread use of ODLs.
To date, the Manatt-CDT team has focused on the privacy and security legal issues affecting the structure and implementation of each grantee’s project. For this next phase, we want to take it up a notch and think about issues beyond just the application of HIPAA and state health privacy laws. Based on our experience in working with the grantees, as well as conversations with the Project HealthDesign National Program Office, we have created an initial list of cross-cutting policy issues that we want to discuss during our the upcoming retreat (September 8-9) in Nashville. The list includes:- Provider liability concerns, including those related to reliance on inaccurate or incomplete data (stemming from ODLs or otherwise) and potential malpractice liability for not accessing or using information generated by patients.
- Assuring the security of information transmitted between portable devices and other computer systems, including use of text messages by providers to communicate with patients.
- The lack of privacy and security protections for many types of Personal Health Records (e.g., those not created on behalf of a HIPAA Covered Entity) and for models of collecting ODLs that may leverage social networking websites.