Millions of Americans are concerned about the control of their personal data, lawyer and privacy activist Deborah Peel told the federal Health IT Policy Committee at a hearing last month. Peel said ensuring data privacy and security is the only way healthcare IT can move forward successfully.
Jodi Daniel, director of the Office of Policy and Research at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), agreed. She said privacy and security are building blocks for meaningful use of healthcare IT.
“The success of health information technology and exchange rests on consumer and provider confidence in privacy and security protections,” Daniel said.
The Health IT Policy Committee is responsible for advising the federal government on:
- Technologies that protect the privacy of health information and promote security in an electronic health record;
- Segmentation and protection from disclosure of specific and sensitive individually identifiable health information with the goal of minimizing the reluctance of patients to seek care;
- Use and disclosure of limited data sets;
- Infrastructure that allows for accurate exchange;
- Technologies for an accounting of TPO (treatment, payment and health operations) disclosures;
- Technologies that allow IIHI to be rendered unusable, unreadable or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals; and
- Methods to facilitate secure access to personal health information by an individual or person assisting in care.
The Health IT Standards Committee also focused on security and privacy last month and endorsed a set of standards for electronic health record systems in its advisory capacity to the Office of the National Coordinator. Security and privacy workgroup member David McCallie, vice president for medical informatics at Cerner Corp, said the standards were designed to ensure that the security of health IT systems is powerful enough to protect health information in a variety of private and public settings while at the same time promoting the sharing of records.
“Security is a balance between ease-of-use, cost and bullet-proof protection,” said John Halamka, MD, vice chairman of the Health IT Standards Committee.
Mary Mosquera, Government Health IT, contributed to this story.
