If you’ve been hesitating to entrust your personal health records to online health providers and insurers, perhaps the newly launched Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information would convince you otherwise. The Health Information standard which was negotiated by Markle Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit group that focuses on uses for information technology, gained the support of Google, Microsoft and other online health care players.
The newly formulated online health information privacy guidelines set forth the best practices in protecting and securing patient data online. With this policy in place, online health care players are hoping that the industry would gain major grounds and earn consumers’ trusts in partaking of their online health services.
The new framework includes guidelines which participants must adhere to and addresses issues on user authentication, audit trails, limiting scope of identifying data to third parties and securing data in transit and at rest. It also includes mechanism for enforcing policy and its parameters.
In case you’re wondering why Google and Microsoft are leading the endorsement of the said framework, just think about the recently launched Google Health Site, and Microsoft’s Health Vault and you’d reckon why.
