By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 9/22/2009 2:21 PM
At a recent meeting of the Health Information Technology Privacy Committee, experts in the field discussed how much control patients should have over their own health records. Reported by Diana Manos in Health Care IT News, the discussion went around the usual positions, from patients should have absolute control of their own personal health information (voiced by our own Deborah Peel and a representative of Planned Parenthood, among others) to a relativistic view that argues that requiring consent for every exchange of health care information is not good for patients.
But the bit that interested me most this time was this: what exactly IS privacy, or the right to privacy, from a political/social/legal point of view?
A participant in the meeting, John Houston, vice president of privacy and information security and assistant counsel at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said privacy is a societal value about which opinions vary dramatically, and, he implied, the varying opinions need to be “balanced”.
Reacting to Mr. Houston’s characterization of privacy as a societal value, Jim Pyles, APsaA’s legislative representative, says this: /p>
Privacy is much more than a “societal value”, it is a fundamental constitutional right, according to the prevailing constitutional case law. The right “to be let alone” is the core concept that underlies our Bill of Rights. The failure of policy makers to realize this is perhaps the most serious indictment of our educational system and surely our law schools.
It seems to me that Jim’s point is one of profound importance, and it is as someone working outside the legal and legislative professions, it is puzzling to me how the constitutional issue can be so easily set aside. |