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Summary: Editor's comments
Review: These are the proceedings of a conference I organized in Cambridge in June 1996, when a debate was raging on whether the British government had the right to collect complete medical records of everyone using the National Health Service, via a number of central databases then under construction. At the conference, we heard how the privacy of electronic medical records is handled in Britain, the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Japan. Shortly after the conference, the Caldicott committee of enquiry was set up to look at the problem and devise medical privacy guidelines for the UK.The papers presented in this conference are of wider interest, though. Arguments over who should know how much about people's medical history continue in a number of countries, and especially in the USA - where one of the last acts of the Clinton administration was to promulgate medical privacy regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The interpretation and implementation of these regulations will be a bone of contention for years to come. This volume documents the views expressed five years ago by some of the main protagonists in the US debate. It also contains useful technical matter on such issues as how to do access control in hospital computer systems and how to manage research databases of de-identified medical records. I believe that the information contained in this volume will continue to cast light on such problems for many years to come. However much the technology changes, the political and philosophical issues are probably timeless.
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