Collaborating for Public Health while Preserving Personal Privacy: Challenges and Potential Solutions

Amidst threats of pandemic avian influenza and bioterrorist attack, public health surveillance and preparedness have never been more important or time critical.  Maintaining continuous situational awareness is key to detecting biological events early and to responding quickly and appropriately.  Essential to situational awareness is the timely availability of information relating to individuals’ healthcare behaviors and clinical conditions – posing a threat to personal privacy.  While the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule enables the sharing of protected health information (PHI) for public health purposes, it stipulates that the limited data set shared must be the minimum necessary and the release must be audited.  However, as a federal regulation, the Privacy Rule is superseded by any state laws with stricter provisions – leaving public health and its clinical-care partners with the challenge of complying with multiple laws and regulations, local security and privacy policies, and patient privacy consent directives.  The “grand challenge” is to maintain an optimal balance between protecting the nation’s health and respecting the personal privacy of its citizens.     

In 2006, the author published a paper [1] in which she introduced a risk model representing the complex interplay among concepts and relationships that must be considered in order to protect public health while respecting and preserving personal privacy.  Using this model as a foundation, she will identify and characterize the security and privacy challenges involved in collaborating across legal, regulatory, and policy boundaries for situational awareness.   She will describe how security and privacy policy and technology can be leveraged to address these challenges, and conclude with specific recommendations. 

Reference:

[1] Baker, D.  “Privacy and Security in Public Health: Maintaining the Delicate Balance between Personal Privacy and Population Safety.”  Distinguished Practitioner Paper.  Proceedings of the 2006 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference.  IEEE. 2006.