Privacy advocates hail stimulus bills
By Nancy Ferris
Monday, February 02, 2009
As Congress gets ready to pass the economic stimulus bill, health privacy advocates find themselves in an unaccustomed position: the driver’s seat.
Privacy leaders such as Dr. Deborah Peel, founder of Patient Privacy Rights, and Devin McGraw, director of the Health Privacy Project at a Washington think tank, have hailed the privacy provisions in the House-passed stimulus bill.
Meanwhile, the health plan industry organization, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores are among those objecting to the privacy provisions, which would extend and strengthen privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
The privacy language in the health IT section of the Senate bill resembles that of the House bill. That suggests there will not be much opportunity to modify it before the legislation becomes final and goes to President Obama for his signature.
However, there are some differences between the bills, including the amount of money allocated for health IT. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said the Senate bill contains $28 billion for health care providers who adopt e-medical records. The House bill contains no more than $23 billion.
The Senate is expected to approve its bill in the first week of February. The House and Senate then will reconcile the differences between their bills, a process leaders want to complete by mid-February.
McGraw, of the think tank the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Senate Judiciary Committee at a January hearing that “the privacy provisions in the proposed legislation take concrete, incremental steps toward the realization of a comprehensive framework of privacy and security protections for electronic health information, and CDT supports them.”
However, she said, “they are only a first step.” More needs to be done in the areas of enforcement and oversight, McGraw said.
Peel said in a statement, “We strongly support this bill as the first step toward meaningful and comprehensive privacy protections needed to create a trusted electronic health system.”
At the Senate hearing, John Paul Houston, vice president for information security and privacy of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, testified that the bill “falls short of providing a comprehensive and workable framework” for privacy of e-health records. He objected specifically to several sections of the bill relating to enforcement, technology standards, breach notification and other topics.
Houston, a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, warned that “information barriers established in the interest of privacy have detrimentally affected patient care.”
AHIP, in a letter to Congress, took much the same tack. It said some of the provisions could hinder the development of health IT. For example, AHIP said, a requirement for accounting to patients of most disclosures of their EHRs “is likely to have the unintended consequence of discouraging – rather than encouraging—the use of electronic health records.”
The chain drug store association said in a statement that “the House bill … still contains 'privacy' provisions that continue to present significant problems for our industry's ability to operate efficiently and in a manner that allows us to freely communicate with patients about legitimate and beneficial treatment options."
