Crossed Wires
How Yesterday's Privacy Rules Might Undercut Tomorrow's Nationwide Health Information Network
Published In: Health Affairs, v. 28, no. 2, Mar./Apr. 2009, p. 450-452
Posted on RAND.org on March 15, 2009
More than a decade after passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), concerns about the privacy and security of personal health information remain a major policy issue. Now, the emergence of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) presents deeper underlying privacy challenges, which will require renewed attention from policymakers as federal and state privacy rules need to be revisited. This is necessary because the current framework of privacy laws is not well suited for regulating a transformed health care system, where computer networks supersede conventional communications media.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.