“In my post on the Declaration of Health Rights (linked to above), I wrote that one key approach to ensuring that there be more widespread sharing of data would be for participatory-medicine-minded health care providers to revise their Notices of Privacy Practices (NPPs) (as they will have to by February, thanks to the Son of HIPAA rules under the HITECH Act effective then). One reason for my suggestion that the change come from the provider side is very pragmatic. Privacy advocates have promoted a number of emendations to the standard NPP language used by health care providers, but my educated guess is that virtually all health care providers collecting signed NPPs are completely incapable of managing such “exceptions.” Are they required to do so? Yes. Can we reasonably expect that they will? No. So the carefully-drafted amendments are, at best, sitting in non-digitized storage somewhere, collecting dust.”
Article
David Harlow, HealthBlawg, 16 December 2009
