Source: GovCIO
Ensuring data security while keeping critical health care information flowing across agency networks continues to be a major challenge amid evolving security threats. Certain policies can make it more difficult for organizations to move patient data in a secure and private manner. Elisabeth Meyers, deputy director of the Office of Policy at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), said that agencies have the technology moving in the right direction, but there are still policy barriers to overcome.
“The policy barriers are that we often find that the perceived risk of privacy is overtaking the very real risk of not being able to share data accurately for care. So, there is a real privacy risk that is realistic. We know that that exists,” Meyers said. “But very often, the perception of technology being new or different in health care is overtaking that and putting barriers in place … when we could be more freely aggregating data and sharing data in a useful way for care coordination, research, public health and closing that circle of how that data works together.”