The American Medical Informatics Association on Monday released a report concluding that efforts to access and use health care data for purposes unrelated to patient care likely will increase as electronic health record adoption increases, Modern Healthcare reports. The report calls for a national framework regarding the secondary use of health information.
Secondary use of health information includes: marketing and other commercial purposes; payment; provider certification or accreditation; public health purposes; quality and safety measurement; and research.
A national framework would ease "the broad and repeated collection, storage, aggregation, linkage and transmission of health data with appropriate protections for legitimate secondary use," the report states. It recommends:
- Increasing transparency and public awareness of the secondary uses of health data;
- Focusing discussions on access, use and control of data and not on ownership of information;
- Creating a taxonomy on secondary use of health data; and
- Including a consensus on privacy, policy and security in a national framework.
The report, titled "Toward a National Framework for the Secondary Use of Health Data," was created from discussions at an April meeting of 36 EHR-industry representatives (Robeznieks,
Modern Healthcare, 9/12).