Health IT lawmakers study privacy
- By Nancy zz_Ferris
- Jun 19, 2006
Legislators are concerned about protecting privacy as they craft federal laws.
Privacy has become the most troublesome issue for legislators trying to craft a federal law to promote health information technology.
Almost everyone who spoke at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Health Subcommittee in March expressed concerns about protecting the privacy of patients’ information. But they had different views on how to ensure the confidentiality of the records.
The hearing also revealed divisions on anti-kickback proposals and other elements of pending legislation.
It was the first hearing on the Health IT Promotion Act of 2005, which Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.) introduced in October 2005 and which remains pending. The subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), is a co-sponsor of the bill.
In his introductory remarks, Deal urged his colleagues to be cautious of sweeping legislative proposals that might interfere with the natural progress of health IT in the marketplace. Deal called for strong but practical privacy protections.
“There must be adequate protections for patient privacy,” said Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the subcommittee’s ranking member. “We’ve all read the stories about stolen bank records in the last few months. Imagine if they were stolen medical records.”
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was concerned that existing privacy protections under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 do not apply to many of the people with access to health records.
Johnson and Deal’s bill would establish federal privacy protections that could override the patchwork of state privacy laws. Many of those laws are more stringent than HIPAA and other federal privacy rules, and rules in one state often conflict with those in another state.
The override provision drew praise from Don Detmer, president of the American Medical Informatics Association; Alan Mertz, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association; and others. “Personally, I don’t see how we can get to the common standards and interoperability that underlie the widespread adoption of electronic health records without federal pre-emption of conflicting state laws,” Detmer said.
But strong criticism came from Bill Vaughan, senior policy analyst at the Consumers Union, and James Pyles, a lawyer representing the American Psychoanalytic Association.
They said HIPAA protections are inadequate and state laws often provide necessary privacy protection.
“Health IT creates the potential for breaches of health information privacy on a scale previously unimaginable,” Pyles said. “Once health information is disclosed electronically, it cannot be recovered.”
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