Introducing New Blogger Anthony W. Orlando

Anthony W. Orlando is joining Bill of Health as a regular contributor.

Anthony is an Assistant Lecturer in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he is completing his PhD in Public Policy and Management. He also contributes to the Huffington Post. He hosts the podcast “Our American Discourse,” sponsored by the USC Bedrosian Center. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master’s in economic history from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a member of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

Representative publications:

Please join us in welcoming Anthony!

Privacy and Confidentiality: Bill of Health at Five Years and Beyond

In honor of the occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of Bill of Health, this post reflects on the past five years of what’s generally known as “privacy” with respect to health information.  The topic is really a giant topic area, covering a vast array of questions about the security and confidentiality of health information, the collection and use of health information for public health and research, commercialization and monetization of information, whether and why we care about health privacy, and much more.  Interestingly, Bill of Health has no categorizations for core concepts in this area:  privacy, confidentiality, security, health data, HIPAA, health information technology—the closest is a symposium on the re-identification of information, held in 2013.  Yet arguably these issues may have a significant impact on patients’ willingness to access care, risks they may face from data theft or misuse, assessment of the quality of care they receive, and the ability of public health to detect emergencies.

Over the past five years, Bill of Health has kept up a steady stream of commentary on privacy and privacy-related topics.  Here, I note just a few of the highlights (with apologies to those I might have missed—there were a lot!) There have been important symposia:  a 2016 set of critical commentaries on the proposed revisions of the Common Rule governing research ethics and a 2013 symposium on re-identification attacks.  There have been reports on the privacy implications of recent or proposed legislation: the 21st Century Cures Act, the 2015 proposal for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, and the proposed Workplace Wellness Bill’s implications for genetic information privacy.  Many comments have addressed big data in health care and the possible implications for privacy.  Other comments have been highly speculative, such as scoping out the territory of what it might mean for Amazon to get into the health care business. There have also been reports of research about privacy attitudes, such as the survey of participants in instruments for sharing genomic data online.  But there have been major gaps, too, such as a dearth of writing about the potential privacy implications of the precision medicine and million lives initiative and only a couple of short pieces about the problem of data security.

Here are a few quick sketches of the major current themes in health privacy and data use, that I hope writers and readers and researchers and most importantly policy makers will continue to monitor over the next five years (spoiler alert: I plan to keep writing about lots of them, and I hope others will too): Read More

What’s Next for the ACA?: A Lecture by Larry Levitt

What’s Next for the ACA?: A Lecture by Larry Levitt
October 3, 2017 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 1010
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Join Larry Levitt for a talk about the future of the Affordable Care Act and health care in America.

Larry Levitt is Senior Vice President for Special Initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Senior Advisor to the President of the Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, he served as a Senior Health Policy Advisor to the White House and Department of Health and Human Services. He holds a bachelors degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a masters degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Center for Health Law Policy and Innovation, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and the Harvard Health Law Society, all at Harvard Law School.

TODAY, 10/2 at 5 PM: Health Law Workshop with Alicia Ely Yamin

October 2, 2017, 5-7 PM
Hauser Hall, Room 104

Harvard Law School, 1575 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Presentation: “Democracy, Health Systems and the Right to Health: Narratives of Charity, Markets and Citizenship”

This paper is not available for download. To request a copy in preparation for the workshop, please contact Jennifer Minnich at jminnich@law.harvard.edu.

Alicia Yamin is the Program Director of the Health and Human Rights Initiative. Prior to joining the O’Neill Institute, Alicia was a Lecturer on Law and Global Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and the Director of the JD /MPH Program. Alicia was also the Policy Director at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard, a Global Fellow at the Centre for Law and octal transformation in Norway, and was selected as the 2015-16 Marsha Lilien Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights, University of Connecticut. Trained in both law and public health at Harvard, Yamin’s 20-year career at the intersection of health and human rights has bridged academia and activism.  From 2007 to 2011, Yamin held the prestigious Joseph H. Flom Fellowship on Global Health and Human Rights at Harvard Law School.  Prior to that, she served as Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights, where she oversaw all of the organization’s field investigations, and was on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Yamin was a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Economic and Social Rights for 15 years and the Chair from 2009-2014. Read More