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The eMatchPhysicians Blog 
Should Microsoft and Google Be Bound by HIPAA?
Posted on: Thursday, May 28, 2009
In a Health IT Strategist reader poll, readers were asked if the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should force Microsoft, Google and other personal health information providers to abide by standards put forward by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
The HIPAA standards were not created for personal health records (PHR) that are controlled by the patient themselves. In addition, the standards are not stringent enough for a PHR record bank or HealthVault, since the individual or patient does not control how information is used. Written assurances necessary under HIPAA are not enough to protect the individual, since “business use” of their health record can apply to more applications than it is possible to list in this small space.
Microsoft and Google are not central databanks designed specifically for PHR’s and are therefore not accountable to the HHS for the ways that they choose to share information. PHR repositories, such as hospitals and other health care organizations, must take care to store the information in such a manner that it can’t make it onto a search engine in the first place. By the time the information has made it to a public search engine such as Microsoft or Google, privacy has already been breached on a massive scale. You can’t make the search engines “put the genie back in the box” as it is not under their power that it was released in the first place.
Tags: google, health insurance, HIPAA, microsoft
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