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Tag: Patient Privacy Rights

A Patient’s View of the Cures Regulations

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

How should we react to 1,718 pages of new regulation? Let’s start by stipulating the White House and HHS perspective: 

“Taken together, these reforms will deliver on the promise to put patients at their center of their own health care — you are empowered with control over your own health care choices.” 

Next, let’s stipulate the patient perspective via this video lovingly assembled by e-Patient Dave, Morgan Gleason, and the folks at the Society for Participatory Medicine. In less than 3 minutes, there are 15 patient stories, each with a slightly different take on success.

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Barbarians at the Gate

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

US healthcare is exceptional among rich economies. Exceptional in cost. Exceptional in disparities. Exceptional in the political power hospitals and other incumbents have amassed over decades of runaway healthcare exceptionalism. 

The latest front in healthcare exceptionalism is over who profits from patient records. Parallel articles in the NYTimes and THCB frame the issue as “barbarians at the gate” when the real issue is an obsolete health IT infrastructure and how ill-suited it is for the coming age of BigData and machine learning. Just check out the breathless announcement of “frictionless exchange” by Microsoft, AWS, Google, IBM, Salesforce and Oracle. Facebook already offers frictionless exchange. Frictionless exchange has come to mean that one data broker, like Facebook, adds value by aggregating personal data from many sources and then uses machine learning to find a customer, like Cambridge Analytica, that will use the predictive model to manipulate your behavior. How will the six data brokers in the announcement be different from Facebook?

The NYTimes article and the THCB post imply that we will know the barbarians when we see them and then rush to talk about the solutions. Aside from calls for new laws in Washington (weaken behavioral health privacy protections, preempt state privacy laws, reduce surprise medical bills, allow a national patient ID, treat data brokers as HIPAA covered entities, and maybe more) our leaders have to work with regulations (OCR, information blocking, etc…), standards (FHIR, OAuth, UMA), and best practices (Argonaut, SMART, CARIN Alliance, Patient Privacy Rights, etc…). I’m not going to discuss new laws in this post and will focus on practices under existing law.

Patient-directed access to health data is the future. This was made clear at the recent ONC Interoperability Forum as opened by Don Rucker and closed with a panel about the future. CARIN Alliance and Patient Privacy Rights are working to define patient-directed access in what might or might not be different ways. CARIN and PPR have no obvious differences when it comes to the data models and semantics associated with a patient-directed interface (API). PPR appreciates HL7 and CARIN efforts on the data models and semantics for both clinics and payers.

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Patient Privacy Rights: Comment on Regulatory Capture

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Deborah C. Peel
Adrian Gropper

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C PEEL, MD

To ONC and CMS

We begin by commending HHS, CMS, and ONC for skillfully addressing the pro-competitive and innovative essentials in crafting this Rule and the related materials. However, regulatory capture threatens to derail effective implementation of the rule unless HHS takes further action on the standards.

Regulatory capture in Wikipedia begins:

“Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.  When regulatory capture occurs, the interests of firms, organizations, or political groups are prioritized over the interests of the public, leading to a net loss for society. Government agencies suffering regulatory capture are called “captured agencies.” (end of Wikipedia quotation.)

The extent to which HHS has allowed itself to be influenced by special interests is not the subject of this comment. This comment is just about how HHS and the Federal Health Architecture can act to more effectively implement the sense of Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act.

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Remembering the Real Stakeholders: Patient Privacy Rights Comments to TEFCA Draft 2

Deborah C. Peel
Adrian Gropper

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C. PEEL, MD

TEFCA will succeed where previous national health information exchange efforts have failed only if it puts patients’ and families’, and/or their fiduciary agents, in control of health technology. This is the only path to restore trust in physicians, and to ensure accurate and complete data for treatment and research.

As physicians and patient advocates, we seek a longitudinal health record, patient-centered in the sense of being independent of any particular institution. An independent health record is also essential to enhancing competition and innovation for health services. TEFCA Draft 2 is the latest in a decade of starts down the path to an independent longitudinal health record, but it still fails to deal with the problems of consent, patient matching, and regulatory capture essential for a national-scale network. Our comments on regulatory capture will be filed separately.

We strongly support the importance in Draft 2 of Open APIs, Push, and a relationship locator service. We also strongly support expanding the scope to a wider range of data sources, beyond just HIPAA covered entities in order to better serve the real-world needs of patients and families.

However, Draft 2 still includes design practices such as the lack of patient transparency, lack of informed consent, and a core design based on involuntary surveillance. This institution-centered design barely works at a community level and leaves out many key real-world participants. It is wishful thinking to believe that it will work with expanded participant scope and on a national scale.

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Remembering the Real Stakeholders: Patient Privacy Rights Comments on the Proposed CMS Regulation Pursuant to the Cures Act

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Deborah C. Peele
Adrian Gropper

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C. PEEL, MD

Electronic health records (EHRs) are a polarizing issue in health reform. In their current form, they are frustrating to many physicians and have failed to support cost improvements. The current round of federal intervention is proposed rulemaking pursuant to the 21st Century Cures Act calls for penalties for “information blocking” and for technology that physicians and patients could use “without special effort.”

The proposed rules are over one thousand pages of technical jargon that aims to govern how one machine communicates with another when the content of the communication is personal and very valuable information about an individual. Healthcare is a challenging and unique industry when it comes to interoperability. Hospitals spend lavishly on EHRs and pursue information blocking as a means to manipulate the physicians and patients who might otherwise bypass the hospital on the way to health reform. The result is a broken market where physicians and patients directly control trillions of dollars in spending but have virtually zero market power over the technology that hospitals and payers operate as information brokers.

What follows below are comments by Patient Privacy Rights on the proposed rule. The common thread of our comments is the need to treat patients and physicians, not the data brokers, as the real stakeholders.

Comments to the ONC Rule

Overview: 21st Century health care innovation, policy, and practice is increasingly dependent on personal information. This is obvious with respect to machine learning and risk adjustment, but personal information is now central to the competitive strategy for most of the health care economy, clinical as well as research. ONC’s drafting of this rule reflects the importance of competition to innovation and cost containment.

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Sony Hack Reveals Health Details on Employees and Their Children

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By DEBORAH PEEL, MD

The Interview
On top of everything else, the Sony data breach revealed employees’ sensitive health information:  Top Sony executives saw lists of named employees who had costly medical treatments and saw detailed psychiatric treatment records of one employee’s son.

Like last year’s revelation by AOL’s CEO, it shows US corporations look at employees’ health information and costs. By ‘outing’ the fact that 2 of AOL’s 5,000 employees had premature infants whose treatment cost over $1 million each, the CEO violated the employees’ rights to health information privacy.

Trusted relationships simply cannot exist if individuals have no right to decide who to let in and who to keep out of pii. Current US technology systems make it impossible for us to control personal health data, inside or outside of the healthcare system.

Do you trust your employer not to snoop in your personal health information?  How can you trust your employer without a ‘chain of custody’ for  your health data? There is no transparency or accountability for the sale or use of our health data, even though Congress gave us the right to obtain an “Accounting for Disclosures (A4D)” for disclosures of protected health data from EHRs in the 2009 stimulus bill (the regulations have yet to be written).  And we have no complete map that tracks the millions of places US citizens’ health data flows. See: TheDataMap.

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Is Deborah Peel up to her old tricks?

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By Matthew Holt

Long time (well very long time) readers of THCB will remember my extreme frustration with Patients Privacyflying cadeucii Rights founder Deborah Peel who as far as I can tell spent the entire 2000s opposing electronic health data in general and commercial EMR vendors in particular. I even wrote a very critical piece about her and the people from the World Privacy Forum who I felt were fellow travelers back in 2008. And perhaps nothing annoyed me more than her consistently claiming that data exchange was illegal and that vendors were selling personally identified health data for marketing and related purposes to non-covered entities (which is illegal under HIPAA).

However, in recent years Deborah has teamed up with Adrian Gropper, whom I respect and seemed to change her tune from “all electronic data violates privacy and is therefore bad”, to “we can do health data in a way that safeguards privacy but achieves the efficiencies of care improvement via electronic data exchange”. But she never really came clean on all those claims about vendors selling personally identified health data, and in a semi-related thread on THCB last week, it all came back. Including some outrageous statements on the extent of, value of, and implications of selling personally identified health data. So I’ve decided to move all the relevant comments to this blog post and let the disagreement continue.

What started the conversation was a throwaway paragraph at the end of a comment I left in which I basically told Adrian to rewrite what he was saying in such a way that normal people could understand it. Here’s my last paragraph

As it is, this is not a helpful open letter, and it makes a bunch of aggressive claims against mostly teeny vendors who have historically been on the patients’ side in terms of accessing data. So Adrian, Deborah & PPR need to do a lot better. Or else they risk being excluded back to the fringes like they were in the days when Deborah & her allies at the World Privacy Forum were making ridiculous statements about the concept of data exchange.

Here’s Deborah’s first commentContinue reading…

Ebola Offers a Teachable Moment For Health Information Technology

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

new adrian gropper

The essence of controlling Ebola is surveillance. To accept surveillance, the population must trust the system responsible for surveillance. That simple fact is as true in Liberia as it is in the US. The problem is that health care surveillance has been privatized and interoperability is at the mercy of commerce.

Today I listened to the JASON Task Force meeting. The two hours were dedicated to a review of their report to be presented next week at a joint HIT Committee Meeting.

The draft report is well worth reading. Today’s discussion was almost exclusively on Recommendations 1 and 6. I can paraphrase the main theme of the discussion as “Interoperability moves at the speed of commerce and the commercial interests are not in any particular hurry – what can we do about it?”

Health information technology in the US is all about commerce. In a market that is wasting $1 Trillion per year in unwarranted and overpriced services, interoperability and transparency are a risk. Public health does not pay the bills for EHR vendors or their hospital customers.

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Chaos and Order: An Update From Patient Privacy Rights

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By Andy Oram

Thanks to the flood of new data expected to enter the health field from all angles–patient sensors, public health requirements in Meaningful Use, records on providers released by the US government, previously suppressed clinical research to be published by pharmaceutical companies–the health field faces a fork in the road, one direction headed toward chaos and the other toward order.

The road toward chaos is forged by the providers’ and insurers’ appetites for categorizing us, marketing to us, and controlling our use of the health care system, abetted by lax regulation. The alternative road is toward a healthy data order where privacy is protected, records contain more reliable information, and research is supported or even initiated by cooperating patients.

This was my main take-away from a day of meetings and a panel held recently by Patient Privacy Rights, a non-profit for whom I have volunteered during the past three years. The organization itself has evolved greatly during that time, tempering much of the negativity in which it began and producing a stream of productive proposals for improving the collection and reuse of health data. One recent contribution consists of measuring and grading how closely technology systems, websites, and applications meet patients’ expectations to control and understand personal health data flows.

With sponsorship by Microsoft at their Innovation and Policy Center in Washington, DC, PPR offered a public panel on privacy–which was attended by 25 guests, a very good turnout for something publicized very modestly–to capitalize on current public discussions about government data collection, and (without taking a stand on what the NSA does) to alert people to the many “little NSAs” trying to get their hands on our personal health data.

It was a privilege and an eye-opener to be part of Friday’s panel, which was moderated by noted privacy expert Daniel Weitzner and included Dr. Deborah Peel (founder of PPR), Dr. Adrian Gropper (CTO of PPR), Latanya Sweeney of Harvard and MIT, journalist Sydney Brownstone of Fast Company, and me. Although this article incorporates much that I heard from the participants, it consists largely of my own opinions and observations.

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What Do Patients Really Think? A Report From the Third Annual Health Privacy Summit

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By Andy Oram

Health reform activists and privacy mavens have been at loggerheads for years. Those touting health reform complain that an oversensitivity to privacy risks would hold back progress in treatments. Running in parallel but in the opposite direction, the privacy side argues that current policies are endangering patients and that the current rush to electronic records and health information exchange can make things worse.

It’s time to get past these arguments and find a common ground on which to institute policies that benefit patients. Luckily, the moment is here where we can do so. The common concern these two camps have for giving patients power and control can drive technological and policy solutions.

Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist who founded Patient Privacy Rights, has been excoriated by data use advocates for ill-considered claims and statements in the past. But her engagement with technology experts has grown over the years, and given the appointment of a Chief Technology Officer, Adrian Gropper, who is a leading blogger on this site, PPR is making real contributions to the discussion of appropriate technologies.

PPR has also held three Health Privacy Summits in Washington, DC, at the Georgetown Law Center, just a few blocks from the Capitol building. Although Congressional aides haven’t found their way to these conferences as we hoped (I am on the conference’s planning committee), they do draw a wide range of state and federal administrators along with technologists, lawyers, academics, patient advocates, and health care industry analysts. The most recent summit, held on June 5 and 6, found some ways to move forward on the data sharing vs. privacy stand-off in such areas as patient repositories, consent, anonymization, and data segmentation. It also highlighted how difficult these tasks are.

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