The federal Privacy Rule, implemented in the United States in 2003, as part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), created new restrictions on the release of medical information for research. Many believe that its restrictions have fallen disproportionately on researchers prompting some to call for changes to the Rule. Here we ask what patients think about r...

1. Forum: Loud-but Not Yet Clear. Environ Health Perspect 106:A222-A223 (1998). 2. Holzman D. Focus: Plane pollution. Environ Health Perspect 105:1300-1305 (1997). 3. Health Council of the Netherlands: Committee on Noise and Health. Noise and Health [Geluid en gezondheid]. nr 1994/15E. The Hague:Health Council of the Netherlands, 1994. 4. IEH. The Non-auditory Effects of Noise. Leicester, UK:ln...

On January 25, 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) published final regulations making important changes to requirements under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”). The final regulations are the result of a rulemaking process that has taken over two years and implement changes made in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Cl...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this article is to discuss the potential issue of exposing patient information from digital images used in PowerPoint presentations. CONCLUSION Current methods for safeguarding patient information in PowerPoint presentations still contain the potential for risk. In radiology, many digital images used in PowerPoint contain hidden patient identification information. Alt...

Women's Health Surveillance Report Marie DesMeules, Donna Stewart, Arminée Kazanjian, Heather McLean, Jennifer Payne, Bilkis Vissandjée The Women's Health Surveillance Report was funded by Health Canada, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (Canadian Population Health Initiative) and the Canadian Institutes of Health...

This study measured attitudes about patient privacy. Participants ranked a collection of 25 patient- specific health information protection measures that have been established as a part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), effective in April 2003. Individual points of view were surveyed to determine which information protection measures patients felt to be least e...

The HIPAA privacy rule (HIPAA) has had both positive and negative effects on the release of patient information by healthcare facilities. Although the intention of HIPAA was to protect patient privacy and to promote security and confidentiality of patient information, it has had unintended consequences for facilities. To identify some of these unintended effects, two expert panels of health inf...

Abstract There are strong arguments that national catastrophic drug insurance should be established in Canada with assistance from the federal government. The author of this paper projects the long-run program costs for two proposals for such a program: that of the Kirby Committee and that of the Romanow Commission. He concludes that both the annual program costs to the federal government and t...

The authors monitored the implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) from 1997 to 1999. Regulators in all states and relevant federal agencies were interviewed and applicable laws and regulations studied. The authors found that HIPAA changed legal protections for consumers' health coverage in several ways. They examine how the process of regulating such co...