FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced his intention today to block a privacy rule adopted by the Commission late last year.
At the federal level, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has both a "Privacy Rule" that governs permissible uses and disclosures of protected health information (PHI), and a "Security Rule" that governs electronic storage and transfer of PHI by certain covered entities, including health plans, healthcare providers and any business associates of these entities.
Any large database of identifiable personal health information (PHI), such as that from an EMR, is subject to the Common Rule 38 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which also has a privacy rule embedded within it.
This is emerging as a hot-button issue between the United States, which demands unfettered cross-border data transfer, and the EU, which on October 11 issued a revised privacy rule that contradicts the US position.
We restricted our analyses to those children for whom we had complete data (a strength), but our timing during implementation of a US federal privacy rule restricted our access to charts for about one third of children (a weakness).
In a complaint, the Federal Trade Commission said that Artist Arena, the operator of the sites, violated a children's online privacy rule by collecting personal details — like the names, e-mail addresses, street addresses and cellphone numbers — of about 101,000 children aged 12 or younger without their parents' permission.
The measure would reverse the Broadband Privacy Rule, a piece of regulation set by Obama's FCC.
A joint resolution has just been passed by both houses of Congress and all but signed by the president, reversing the Broadband Privacy Rule, a piece of regulation from the FCC that made some inconvenient changes to the ways internet providers can collect and sell the data they collect on consumers.
If the public health authority is also a covered entity, the Privacy Rule would apply for subsequent uses, for example, research (see discussion below).
For example, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule defines a small geographic area as one having a population smaller than 20,000.
The good news, such as it is, is this: Congressional Republicans (most of them; 15 representatives voted against, it's worth mentioning) initiated this joint resolution in a great hurry because the privacy rule hadn't actually taken effect yet.
