Health IT All A “Twitter” During Health Affairs Event

The nation’s preeminent health policy publication, Health Affairs, is holding an event today highlighting a series of major policy papers published in its latest issue. CDT’s Deven McGraw, director of the Health Privacy Project, will speak today about key points contained in one of those papers that she and several CDT colleagues authored for the peer-reviewed journal.

HPP’s paper describes a proposed privacy framework developed by the Markle Foundation’s Connecting for Health initiative that would incorporate key privacy principles. Those principles include specific network design features, and oversight mechanisms to establish greater public trust in health IT.

The folks at Health Affairs will cover the event the health IT event live on Twitter. You can follow those updates by following the hashtag #HAHIT (health affairs health IT); you can search Twitter for that hashtag by clicking this link.

The Health Affairs communications staff will be sending “tweets” about speakers key points; linking to abstracts, news coverage, websites, or other relevant information online; and posting photos from the event.

Here’s how Health Affairs describes the current issue:

As the U.S. government prepares to embark on major new investments in health information technology, the latest issue of Health Affairs explores the benefits, challenges and potential risks of transforming the health care system through the use of IT. A series of papers and perspectives suggests that the gains could be real and dramatic – but are often not easy to achieve.

Despite the promises health IT offers, protecting the privacy of people’s health information is a major challenge to ensuring widespread adoption of health IT in the United States. Several papers in the March-April issue tackle the various debates over health information privacy, and offer potential solutions to this thorny issue.