Military Health System Study Analyzes Privacy Challenges

Considering the privacy issues with the Veterans Affairs (VA) recently, military health data privacy has been a hot-button issue in the healthcare sector lately. It seems as though the Military Health System concurs with the notion that a more formalized privacy procedures need to be put in place.

During last week’s HIMSS Privacy and Security Forum, Rosemary Nelson, President and CEO of MDM Strategies, Inc., and Loretta Schlachta-Fairchild, President and CEO of iTelehealth discussed the Military Health System’s recent research findings. The study focused on patient privacy and identity management concerns.

Nelson explained that, at a base level, since the government has to take care of veterans’ healthcare and data, their information will at some point have to be transported between the Department of Defense DoD and VA. Military data, with more veterans than ever, will be flowing between DoD, VA and a network provider of some kind.

You not only need interoperability but also patient privacy and identity management parameters in place to allow all of this transfer. DoD decided it had to identify the policies and standards that are currently in place and need to be in place to ensure that patient privacy and identity management are set for data transfer among those three entities.