Dive Brief:
- With healthcare on the cusp of a digital revolution that promises to use data to drive advances in everything from wellness and prevention to precision medicine, a lack of clarity remains around medical privacy, according to a panel discussion at Fortune‘s first Brainstorm Health conference this week in San Diego, reported Fortune's Sy Mukherjee.
- Amid the concerns are how to deal with massive amounts of data collected from wearables and how employers, as health benefits providers, should or should not play roles in wellness and initiatives that involve employee health data.
- Regulation remains an issue, the panel discussed, given that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), created in the 1990s, is seen by some as too vague or outdated for the impending age of Big Data.
Dive Insight:
The concerns raised by the panel echo ongoing industry discussion around privacy in terms of both patient and employer rights, as well as data security.
The panel featured participation from GE Ventures CEO Sue Siegel, Fitbit chief executive James Park, National Institutes of Health (NIH) deputy director for science, outreach, and policy Kathy Hudson, and USC health policy and economics professor Dana Goldman.
Employer-sponsored wellness programs were highlighted in the discussion due to the collision of their potential with concerns around EEOC rules allowing extensive financial incentives to be tied to health data sharing, a matter recently addressed in a lawsuit lodged by the AARP. Fitbit's Park noted the company tries to address the matter by requiring employers to agree to an "employee bill of rights" before integrating the trackers into wellness programs.
Beyond rights, to the area of risk, Hudson described data security as the issue that keeps her up at night, particularly when it comes to the Obama administration’s initiative aiming to sequence one million Americans’ genomes, which brought related debate at a separate conference hosted earlier this year by Bloomberg Government and SAP.
With cyber attacks on health data playing an increasingly visible and prominent role in recent years, “Having a million people’s data is going to be a big, fat target," Hudson said.