Source: Urology Times
Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, says the creators of the HITECH Act, may not have anticipated the privacy issues associated with using patient data for research. “If you’re going to do research using identified data you need patient consent. And consent is complex from a policy and technical perspective and hard to scale,” Tripathi says. And while data can be de-identified, he adds, doing so creates a new set of challenges. “HIPAA [the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act] requires you take out 18 fields of data,” Tripathi explains. “And once you’ve removed those fields you lose the richness and specificity you need to answer questions like, was a person who just tested positive for COVID vaccinated? If so, which vaccine did they get? Once you’ve de-identified data you’ve lost visibility into those kinds of details.”