The Hipaa omnibus rule: Implications for public health policy and practice

摘要

It has now been more than a decade since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule became effective, following years of conflicts that pitted multiple interests against one another: individual privacy rights, access to personal health information in public health and research endeavors, the economic interests of the health-care sector, and an expanding government role in health care. These influences combined to produce a convoluted and leaky regulatory system that, paradoxically perhaps, has been criticized since its inception as both burdensome to providers and inadequate to assure health information privacy and security for individual patients.