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Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Advance Access published online on January 4, 2007
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrl048
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Access Anxiety: HIPAA and Historical Research

Susan C. Lawrence*

Correspondence: * Susan C. Lawrence, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Program in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities, Carver College of Medicine, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242. Mailing address: Department of History, 280 Schaeffer Hall, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242. Email: susan-lawrence{at}uiowa.edu


  Abstract

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) establishes new standards for the protection of private health information in the United States. The Privacy Rule, one of the specific regulatory provisions of the act, went into effect 14 April 2003 for covered health care providers, institutions, and businesses. The Privacy Rule directly affected medical archivists and their collections. It has significant implications for historians of health care, as well. The Privacy Rule is the first major regulation that protects the privacy of the deceased in perpetuity. It establishes requirements that researchers must satisfy in order to gain access to "individually identifiable health information" held by HIPAA-protected institutions. While these requirements will burden historians in some cases, the Privacy Rule could open up opportunities for well-prepared historians to work with a more extensive range of twentieth-century documents.

Key Words: HIPAA • Privacy Rule • confidentiality • privacy • archive • IRB • Privacy Board


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