RAND mathematician Mary Lee describes the wide variety of personal data collected by smart devices and applications, such as smartwatches, brain implants, and period trackers.
Facial recognition technology is developing rapidly and is increasingly being used in policing. What do policymakers need to understand in order to minimize the risks it poses, while also maximizing its benefits?
In the future, the EU will inevitably have to adjust its system of rules to cope with the evolving uses of personal data, globalization and international data flows, write Neil Robinson and Lorenzo Valeri.
Although the vast majority of U.S. physicians still handwrite prescriptions, adoption of electronic prescribing is slowly growing. Major barriers to adoption remain, including the inability to electronically submit prescriptions for controlled substances and confusion about standards for data exchange. Federal and state governments and private insurers are using payment and policy incentives to boost e-prescribing because they still believe in its promise for improving the quality and efficiency of health care.
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.
As it considers ways to improve the efficiency and quality of U.S. health care, one issue that a new Congress should reconsider is the longstanding roadblock that has stalled efforts to create a system of unique patient identification numbers for every person in the United States, writes Richard Hillestad.
This research brief summarizes an analysis and comparison of two methods of patient identification -- statistical matching and unique patient identifier -- on error rates, operational efficiency, costs, and privacy and security issues.
Creating a unique patient identification number for every person in the United States would facilitate a reduction in medical errors, simplify the use of electronic medical records, increase overall efficiency and help protect patient privacy.
This fact sheet summarizes research suggesting that there are basic privacy issues that need to be resolved in the implementation of a national health information network.
Recent growth of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications, especially in the retail sector, have raised privacy and data protection concerns. Policy proposals regarding RFID use involve substantial tradeoffs in firms' and individual behaviors.
Companies use RFID workplace access cards to do more than just open doors (e.g., for enforcing rules governing workplace conduct). Explicit, written policies about how such cards are used generally do not exist, and employees are not told about whatever policies are being followed.
The Privacy Rule is fundamentally changing the way that healthcare providers, health plans, and others use, maintain, and disclose health information and the steps that researchers must take to obtain health data.
Testimony before the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia of the Committee on Government Reform, United States House of Representatives, on March 22, 2002.
Are recent laws in conflict with the technological trend toward wireless transfer of physician and patient-specific health information, and will they present overwhelming barriers to the widespread use of e-prescribing?
The Army needs to ensure that the right people—and only the right people—can get access to its information systems, its weapons, and its many databases that serve the Army community. Biometrics may offer a solution.
This paper discusses the author's views about the probable architecture of a particular segment of the National Information Infrastructure (NII), and the policies for security and privacy that are likely to be required.
This paper summarizes the concept of privacy, reviews some of its underlying tenets and axioms, illustrates the drift toward a national counter-privacy posture in terms of events involving the Social Security Number, and discusses new faces in terms of three case histories.
This paper examines emergent privacy issues (e.g. those related to electronic mail and internetting of systems), and relates them to security requirements and to difficulties of designing laws.
The author outlines some constraints on the protection of privacy of electronically transmitted information, and recommends passage of new legislation to protect the privacy of information/data transmitted by present and future technologies.
