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We often don’t advocate studying different folks’s mail, however even in the event you weren’t one of many roughly 130 corporations that obtained a recent joint letter from the FTC and HHS’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR), anybody within the well being area – hospitals, different HIPAA-covered entities, telehealth suppliers, well being app builders, and so on. – ought to take the letter to coronary heart and contemplate a privateness and safety check-up at their enterprise.
The joint letter alerts recipients to the dangers that monitoring applied sciences – together with Meta/Fb pixel and Google Analytics – pose to the privateness and safety of shoppers’ private well being info. As customers work together with web sites or cell apps, applied sciences are sometimes monitoring their on-line actions and gathering private knowledge about them. A lot of this occurs behind the scenes with shoppers totally unaware they’re being tracked and unable to keep away from what’s taking place.
The character of the information these applied sciences are gathering with out shoppers’ consent – for instance, well being situations, diagnoses, drugs, and visits to healthcare suppliers – is uniquely confidential. And impermissible disclosure can result in id theft, monetary loss, discrimination, stigma, psychological anguish, and different injurious penalties.
You’ll need to learn the letter for OCR’s views on monitoring and private well being info, however right here’s a sentence value highlighting: “HIPAA regulated entities are usually not permitted to make use of monitoring applied sciences in a way that may end in impermissible disclosures of PHI to 3rd events or every other violations of the HIPAA Guidelines.” The letter additionally cites a December 2022 OCR bulletin with an summary about how HIPAA applies to using on-line monitoring applied sciences.
However even when an organization isn’t coated by HIPAA, the letter is a reminder that it nonetheless has obligations underneath the FTC Act and the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule to guard towards the impermissible disclosures of private well being info. Citing current FTC regulation enforcement actions towards Easy Healthcare, BetterHelp, GoodRx, and Flo Health, the letter establishes that it is “important to observe knowledge flows of well being info to 3rd events through applied sciences you might have built-in into your web site or app.” What in the event you had another person design your web site or app? The compliance buck nonetheless stops with you. Moreover, your organization is legally accountable even in the event you don’t use the information obtained by monitoring applied sciences for advertising and marketing functions.
Along with underscoring that each companies are watching developments on this space, the letter ends with this admonition: “To the extent you might be utilizing the monitoring applied sciences described on this letter in your web site or app, we strongly encourage you to evaluation the legal guidelines cited on this letter and take actions to guard the privateness and safety of people’ well being info.”
That’s sound recommendation for corporations that obtained the joint letter – and for different companies, too.
Take a look at extra health privacy resources from the FTC.
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