HIPAA Blog

[ Wednesday, November 14, 2007 ]

 

HIPAA Hinders Research: I saw this yesterday but couldn't find the actual article by the time I had to leave, but there's a fairly big story now making headlines (more here, here, here, here and here) about the negative impact HIPAA has had on the research community. As I've said often, privacy comes at a price, and that price includes the best healthcare.

Good, fast, cheap: pick two. That's an old engineering line that proves the truth that you can get a product that's really good, or you can get it developed really fast, or complete the project really cheaply, but you can't do all three. The more you push on one, the more pressure there is for one of the other qualities to fall by the wayside. You can get a good product to market quickly, but it'll cost you. You can get a good product cheaply, but it will take time. Or you can get a product that's cheap and quick, but quality will suffer.

The same's true (in binary format) for healthcare and medical record privacy. The more tightly you restrict the ability of participants in the healthcare field to use and disclose patient information, the less likely those participants are able to provide good healthcare. That's true for clinicians as well as researchers.

Jeff [11:26 AM]

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