Health Data After Covid-19: More Laws, Less Privacy

Plopping down on a mattress, primping in front of a mirror or sitting on a toilet: In coming years, any of these activities could generate the most intimate data about your health, via sensors, wearables, machine-learning algorithms and data-mining systems. Though they promise to make health care more personalized, our nonstop interactions with digital technologies and analytics are upending traditional notions of patient confidentiality. In the U.S., the core federal law restricting the use and protecting the disclosure of health data is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. Congress enacted it in 1996, when much of the health system was paperbound and fax-reliant. The law's age is showing.