Fierce Health Payers February 11, 2020
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Federal health IT leader Donald Rucker, M.D., said an upcoming interoperability rule will include “solid” privacy protections for patients as they share their medical data.
Speaking at Health Datapalooza on Tuesday, Rucker—who is the head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC)—acknowledged that privacy in a digital world is a challenging issue. But he reiterated his perspective that patients should be able to easily access and share medical data.
“It is our human right as patients to have access to our data,” he said.
Rucker was pushing back on health IT vendor Epic’s lobbying efforts against the proposed rules, including an email Epic CEO Judy Faulkner sent to customers encouraging them to sign an...