HHS advisory panel: Give patients some control over e-health records
- By Nancy zz_Ferris
- Feb 20, 2008
The National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) has approved a policy letter recommending that the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) allow patients to withhold or sequester portions of their e-health records.
The recommendation from advisory panel to the Department of Health and Human Services is to go soon to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt. The recommendation could influence decisions on NHIN development, which is being guided by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.
Committee staff members at HHS declined to make the letter with the recommendation public, saying the document needed polishing by an NCVHS subcommittee.
One of the committee’s 17 members, Dr. Marc Overhage, president and chief executive officer of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, voted against the approval. But the near-unanimity did not come easily; the letter under consideration was the seventeenth draft, and the committee had spent 15 months composing and refining it.
“We’re making recommendations in this document that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to implement,” Overhage said, arguing that the money involved could better be spent on other health IT development.
Overhage said he was not sure that individuals do have the right to control information about them maintained by health care providers.
However, other committee members said individuals should be able to withhold information from their health care providers, and citied examples such as histories pertaining to mental health, substance abuse or reproductive health. If patients cannot do that, they may opt out of the network altogether, the members said.
Member Harry Reynolds, vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, said there are many unknowns about the NHIN, which is in the early stages of development. However, a policy that gives individuals some control over their records should help set the direction of network development, he said.
Leslie Pickering Francis, a philosophy and law professor at the University of Utah, agreed. “What this letter is saying is get the design issues [relating to privacy] out on the table,” Francis said, adding that a privacy policy was needed before a NHIN could get to first base.
Although the committee discussed postponing approval yet again, it proceeded because as many as seven members whose terms are expiring could be replaced before the panel's next meeting in May.
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