In the News

The first thing you should know about HIPAA is that it’s HIPAA, not HIPPA. There is only one P, and that P doesn’t stand for “privacy.”

“People make up what that acronym stands for,” Deven McGraw, co-founder and chief regulatory officer of the medical records platform Ciitizen and former deputy director for health information privacy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), told Recode.

“More often than not, [they think it’s] Health Information Privacy Protection Act: HIPPA. Yeah, that law does not exist.”

And yet, when reporters have asked whether an individual has been vaccinated, people at the top levels of government (Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a repeat offender) and sport (Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott) have invoked HIPAA. Greene has even claimed that just asking the question was somehow a “violation” of her “HIPAA rights.” As more employers and schools mandate that their employee and students get vaccinated, the HIPAA question is coming up again...

...Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) is one of several lawmakers who have pushed for better health privacy protections during the pandemic, including as a co-sponsor of the Public Health Emergency Privacy Act, a bill that was introduced in both houses of Congress in 2020 and reintroduced in early 2021. It would protect digital health data collected for the purpose of stopping the pandemic (for instance, by contact tracing apps or vaccine appointment booking tools) from being used for unrelated purposes by the government or private businesses.

“HIPAA provides some protections for our health information, but technology has advanced must faster than our laws,” DelBene told Recode. “The Public Health Emergency Privacy Act shows how we can protect consumers’ information during the pandemic, but I believe we need to go further since this issue permeates every part of our digital lives.”

DelBene recently introduced the Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act, which includes added protections for sensitive information like health data. It’s one of what will likely be several consumer privacy bills introduced this session, any one of which could give Americans better health privacy protections. That is, of course, assuming any of them actually pass.