HIPAA and Protecting Health Information in the 21st Century

Abstract

While the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been relatively effective at protecting health-data privacy in traditional healthcare settings, the era of big data poses significant challenges to safeguarding personal health information that could nonetheless put individuals at risk of discrimination, invasive marketing, and other objectionable practices. This article explores some of the challenges of existing American legal infrastructure to protect health-data privacy and proposes a number of potential approaches to improving privacy protections.