Todd Shryock reports:
The Confidentiality Coalition and the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange sent a letter to the Commerce and HHS Secretaries outlining their concerns with allowing unregulated third-party apps to get access to patient health information.
The Confidentiality Coalition is composed of a broad group of hospitals, medical teaching colleges, health plans, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, vendors of electronic health records, biotech firms, employers, health product distributors, pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers, health information and research organizations, patient groups, and others founded to advance effective patient confidentiality protections.
While the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act safeguards a specific subset of “protected health information,” the law applies only to traditional health care covered entities (CEs) and their business associates. A vast amount of health-related information does not fall within the HIPAA regulatory framework and is largely unprotected from misuse.
Read more at Medical Economics.
There is no link to the actual letter, and it appears that to access the letter on WEDI’s website, you need to give up a bit of your own privacy and information instead of just being able to read their letter. That’s a shame.