This is a one day event to be held in Washington DC and privacy in healthcare and otherwise is a hot topic today by all means. With the advent of marketing on steroids today we are never exactly quite sure what is being collected at times and where it all goes to be sold. I try to follow this along and from time to time post updates for an awareness of how it all can and does happen. Actually I started discussing privacy when the first medical devices came onto the market back in 2008 and have carried through since.
Those were the early days of collecting data and in only 3 years it has spiraled to areas that we maybe don’t even give any thought to, but it’s out there. Anyone who has written software with SQL queries can tell you about how easy it can be to match anonymized data as that’s part of a process of writing a program, to write and construct queries. With data having such a high market value today, and it’s moved beyond limits to where any of us might have thought. For every dollar one spends on the web, the return that comes back from advertising is worth $43.00 and those numbers were given by a couple of businesses who are in that business. Below is the press release with all the information and links to read up and register at the bottom of the post. BD
“Getting IT Right: Protecting Patient Privacy Rights in a Wired World” is the 
nation’s first open and inclusive public forum to discuss the future of health privacy in the digital age. The conference will be held June 13, 2011 at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C. and is the result of a partnership between the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, the premier health privacy advocacy organization in the United States.”
Press Release:
AUSTIN, Texas, May 11, 2011 – The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation will co-host the nation’s first public summit to discuss the future of health privacy in the digital age. “Getting IT Right: Protecting Patient Privacy in a Wired World” will be held on June 13, 2011 at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C. The event is the first in a planned series of forums on this theme and coincides with the creation of the U.S. government’s plan for a new health information technology (HIT) infrastructure, which will collect personal health information. For agenda and registration information, visit: http://www.healthprivacysummit.org/.
The summit will be interactive and audience members will be expected to contribute questions to panels and participate in work groups to identify urgent health privacy needs, along with the immediate steps needed to deliver responsible and realistic solutions.
Deborah C. Peel, MD, chair of the board of directors of Patient Privacy Rights, Summit co-host, explained, “The goal of the summit is to create the world’s premier public forum on health privacy issues by uniting a ‘brain trust’ of experts - academics, advocates, government, health care, and those in the technology field - who are willing to work together to ensure health privacy is a center-piece of U.S. health care system reforms. We’re very pleased with the response to the Summit, from panelists and speakers to sponsors, which no doubt speaks to the importance and urgency of these issues today and into the future.”
Whether or not the new HIT infrastructure will afford individuals proper control over the sharing of their personal health information is the key issue that will be addressed. Benedicte Callan, Sid Richardson Fellow of health innovation and policy at the LBJ School, feels that the United States is reaching a crossroads in patient privacy with the creation of the HIT infrastructure.
“Designed well, this digital health information system could be the foundation for a more efficient 21st Century health care system,” said Callan. “It could lower costs, make care more safe and effective while leading to new treatments by benefiting research. But without proper protections built in up front, the HIT system could compromise the fundamental rights of citizens to protect their most sensitive personal health information.”
In summation, “The LBJ School has been preparing leaders for 40 years to help find innovative solutions to the most complex public policy issues and challenges of our modern world,” said Robert Hutchings, Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs. “Therefore, we see it as critically important to engage in this issue on every level—local, state, national, international—through research and collaborative partnerships in conferences such as this one. We are especially pleased to join with Patient Privacy Rights and with the other conference participants on working together towards solutions to one of the greatest privacy challenges of our time.”
The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs is a graduate component of The University of Texas at Austin. The School's mission is to develop leaders and innovative ideas that will help our state, the nation and the international community address critical public policy challenges in an ever increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. 
Patient Privacy Rights is the nation’s leading health privacy watchdog and leading consumer voice for building ethical, trustworthy HIT systems. For more information, visit: http://patientprivacyrights.org/.
Major sponsors to date include: Microsoft, Jericho Systems, ID Experts, e-MDs, Inc., and Medical Research and Materiel Command, Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center at the U.S. Department of Defense.
About the speakers:
Alan Westin is Of Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor, Arnold, Golden and Gregory, Atlanta and DC and Emeritus Professor of Public Law and Government with Columbia University's Department of Political Science. His main areas of research address privacy, office automation, and employee fair procedure/EEO issues, and the use of new information technologies to expand the distribution of public information to citizens and the voluntary sector.
For the past three years he served as the academic advisor for national public and leadership surveys on privacy. He has authored or edited 26 books including The Changing Workplace: A Guide to the People, Organizations, and Regulatory Aspects of Office Technology; Individual Rights in the Corporation: A Reader on Employee Rights; and Computers, Health Care, and Citizen Rights: Report of the Project on Medical Records and Citizen Rights.
Westin was instrumental in the authoring of the Privacy Act of 1974, which established the Code of Fair Information Practices that governs the collection, maintenance, use and dissemination of personally identifiable information about individuals that is maintained in systems of records by federal agencies.
Jeff Rosen is a professor of law at The George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. His most recent book is The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America. He also is the author of The Most Democratic Branch, The Naked Crowd, and The Unwanted Gaze. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and Yale Law School.
Professor Rosen's essays and commentaries have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, on National Public Radio, and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. The Chicago Tribune named him one of the 10 best magazine journalists in America and the L.A. Times called him, "the nation's most widely read and influential legal commentator."
Reservation Number: 1-800-695-7460
Cutoff Date: Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 4:00pm EST
When making your reservations please reference The University of Texas, LBJ School of Public Affairs Group to receive the special group rate.
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