Today, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued guidance on how the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) permits covered entities and their business associates to use health information exchanges (HIEs) to disclose protected health information (PHI) for the public health activities…
Category: Healthcare
Vaccine Passports: A Stamp of Inequity
Alexis Hancock and Hayley Tsukayama write: A COVID vaccine has been approved and vaccinations have begun. With them have come proposals of ways to prove you have been vaccinated, based on the presumption that vaccination renders a person immune and unable to spread the virus. The latter is unclear. It also raises digital rights concerns, particularly if…
Amazon rolls out tool to help healthcare companies manage a deluge of data
Elise Reuter reports: As cloud service providers compete for a growing slice of the healthcare market, Amazon Web Services rolled out a new tool to help healthcare and life science companies manage their data. Called Amazon HealthLake, it aggregates a company’s data across disparate formats into one location, where it is standardized so it can be easily…
U.S. health officials propose changes to medical privacy rules to smooth info sharing in crises
AP reports: Urged on by hospitals, doctors and patients, U.S. health officials are proposing changes to medical privacy rules that could ease information sharing in crisis situations. Trump administration officials at the Department of Health and Human Services say their proposal, being released Thursday, adapts lessons learned from the opioid epidemic and the coronavirus pandemic….