Webinar: Granular Data Segmentation to Protect Privacy and Promote Equitable Interoperability

Granular Data Segmentation to Protect Privacy and Promote Equitable Interoperability

WEBINAR

Our discussion will focus around the ability to share patient information between clinical providers, family members/caregivers and other entities meaningfully improve the care of individuals and the health of communities.  When a patient has data they consider to be sensitive in their medical record, they may wish to control how such data gets shared; state and/or federal law may also protect the sharing of specific sensitive data as a means to preserve the integrity of the patient-provider relationship.

Current standards available to granularly segment sensitive data are evolving and have not been widely adopted for a number of reasons including the failure of these standards to meet a number of high priority use cases, a lack of implementation guidance around challenges such as how to balance patient safety with privacy concerns, and the lack of a regulatory impetus.  As a result, many health care organizations and other data holders have resulted in blunt algorithms to ensure legal compliance, which may result in care inequities for patients with sensitive health conditions.

The Protecting Privacy to Promote Interoperability (PP2PI) Workgroup is a national multidisciplinary interest group of over 160 expert stakeholders from across the industry who have come together to address this problem.  The workgroup has developed a set of nationally-acceptable use cases, and is pursuing a seward-maintained terminology value set for sensitive conditions.  Together, these are being leveraged to support standards revision and development, focused on Data Segmentation for Privacy (DS4P) FHIR and the underlying security labels.  The group is drafting an Implementation Guide with consensus-driven guidance around barriers such as access control provisioning, visualization of redacted data and its utilization in decision support algorithms, and break-the-glass policies.

Lessons Learned:

• The ability to share patient information between clinical providers, family members/caregivers and other entities is essential to the provision of good care; in many cases, NOT sharing certain information with specific individuals is just as essential to providing optimal care.
• Lack of widespread implementation of technical standards for granular segmentation of data has led to the adoption of blunt algorithms which may result in care inequities.
• The Protecting Privacy to Promote Interoperability (PP2PI) Workgroup seeks to address this issue by bringing together multidisciplinary stakeholders across the industry to revise standards and develop consensus-driven implementation guidance, in order to support future policy.

Spearker:    Hannah K. Galvin, MD, FAAP, FAMIA,                                                           Chief Medical Information Officer