[Infowarrior] - Federal privacy panel leader resigns, raps standards

[Richard Forno]

ederal privacy panel leader resigns, raps standards
Healthcare IT News
By  Diana Manos, Senior Editor
    http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=6553
02/22/07
WASHINGTON ­ The leader of a federal panel charged with providing privacy
recommendations for the national health information network resigned
Wednesday, thwarted, he said, in efforts to develop adequate standards.

The resignation comes amid complaints from others about the speed with which
standards are being written.

Paul Feldman, deputy director of the nonprofit Health Privacy Project,
stepped down from his position as co-chair of the American Health
Information Community¹s Confidentiality, Privacy, and Security Workgroup,
created in May 2006.

In a letter sent Wednesday to 15 members of Congress, Department of Health
and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt and HHS Interim National
Coordinator for Health Information Technology Robert Kolodner, Feldman said
the workgroup's efforts to establish standards for the nation¹s developing
healthcare IT network, are ³a far cry from a comprehensive and timely
approach that would give privacy policy equal and necessary footing with
interoperability and systems development efforts.²

Janlori Goldman, director of the Health Privacy Project, also signed the
letter.

³We already know that the majority of people in this country fear that their
health information is more prone to misuse in electronic form,² Feldman
said. ³We must not shirk our duty to protect them from such harm.²

AHIC must provide recommendations for healthcare IT standards that will be
required by federal contractors as early as Jan. 2008 ­ and eventually will
be adopted nationwide ­ according to John Halamka, chairman of the Health
Information Technology Standards Panel, also known as HITSP.

HITSP will develop the standards based on AHIC recommendations, Halamka said
at a Feb. 21 AHIC meeting.

HITSP criticized for speed

Feldman is not the first to express dissatisfaction with standards setting.

Long before HHS Secretary Leavitt approved interoperability standards in
December, stakeholders had been raising complaints about the unreasonable
speed that standards are being adopted through the AHIC-HITSP process.

Gary Dickinson, director of healthcare standards for CentrifyHealth and a
panel member on several HITSP committees has submitted more than four public
complaints to HITSP and one set of comments to AHIC within the last year.

Dickinson said he is concerned that the foundation for privacy is missing in
the current standards process, posing a threat to consumers. ³Real world
scenarios are not being taken into account,² Dickenson said. ³Instead of
going through a full analysis process, [HHS] has only cared about the back
end of systems and interoperability standards.²

Dickinson said this raises privacy concerns because information cannot be
exchanged at the back end unless its origination is known through proper
authentication on the front end, ³to ensure that information being exchanged
is trusted.²

In response to Dickinson¹s complaints, Halamka told Healthcare IT News in a
Dec. 18 interview that his role is to make sure every voice in HITSP gets
equally heard. ³Privacy issues are foundational,² Halamka said. ³My sense is
we have a pretty open and transparent process.²

Halamka said Feb. 21 that the interoperability standards are still subject
to small changes over the next year. ³HITSP tried really hard to get it
right, but we still need to be vetted by the industry and reality-checked,²
Halamka said.