Ask a room full of medical thought leaders if America’s health information privacy law—specifically HIPAA, or The Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996—needs a refresh and you’ll hear a resounding “yes,” Fortune reports.
According to Fortune, that’s exactly what happened when the David Agus, the influential physician and CBS correspondent, polled an audience of several dozen in the medical field at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference on March 20. When you ask those same thought leaders what they want to do about HIPPA, it gets a little trickier.
‘I hear this a lot about modernizing HIPAA, but no one actually gives a recommendation for what they would do,’ said Valerie Montgomery Rice, president and dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine. ‘If we had a magical wand, what would we do tomorrow?’
Fortune continues: Indeed. There are many challenges involved in fixing America’s broken healthcare system, but certainly one of the knottiest is privacy—and the many questions that surround the exploding amounts of personal healthcare data.
While some agree that patients should own their data, how it would work given the landscape (and the various demands for the data) leads to more questions than answers. How do we ensure those who interact with the data keep it safe beyond updating HIPAA? Who are all the players involved in healthcare data, and who’s “here for the right reasons?"
Read more at Fortune.
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