HIPAA Privacy Rule, De-Identification Policy, and Recent HHS Guidance

Learning Objectives

During this webinar, participants will learn about:

• How the HIPAA Privacy Rule defines de-identification and the ways in which recent guidance issued by the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services relates to, and clarifies, the definition;
• The differences between the Safe Harbor and Expert Determination variants of the HIPAA de-identification standard;
• The process by which experts apply a principled approach to assess the risk of unique re-identification of health information and the strategies by which they mitigate such risk;
• How expert de-identification determinations have been applied to various types of protected health information and why there is no universal approach;
• Why HIPAA compliant de-identification does not prevent all possible privacy violations and open problems associated with health information privacy protection

Speaker Information

Bradley Malin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics & Computer Science
Vice Chair for Research, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Director of the Health Information Privacy Laboratory
Vanderbilt University

Bradley Malin, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, where he founded and currently directs the Vanderbilt Health Information Privacy Laboratory. He is an internationally recognized expert on data privacy and has served on national advisory committees for the Institute of Medicine regarding the management of data from electronic medical record systems and biorepositories. He has consulted on de-identification solutions for numerous industrial, not-for-profit, and government agencies. His research has been published through over seventy peer-reviewed articles, portions of which have been cited in the Federal Register, Congressional briefings, and popular media outlets such as Nature News, Scientific American, and MIT Technology Review. Among various honors, he received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and was the youngest elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). He received a bachelor’s in biological sciences, master’s in public policy and management, and doctorate in computer science, all from Carnegie Mellon University. Additional information can be found at http://www.hiplab.org/people/malin.