HealthMagic Inc.’s CEO Calvin Wiese on Friday outlined a list of guiding principles to protect consumer privacy and confidentiality, as health records move to the Internet.
Wiese made his remarks to the Federal Trade Commission’s National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics.
The main principles are:
o Storage and management of personal health information should be treated as a sacred trust.
o Permission to disclose individually identifiable health information needs to be explicitly granted by the consumer.
o Personal health information stored on the Internet should be used for the consumer’s benefit, including increased understanding about health, access to new and alternative treatments for conditions, information concerning relevant products and services, and convenient access to healthcare.
HealthMagic Inc. is a Web-based technology company that develops state-of-the-art healthcare applications for the Internet.
“Protecting the identity of the individual is one of the highest concerns associated with making personal health information accessible over the Internet,” Wiese said. “At HealthMagic, we are very optimistic about the opportunities created by using the Internet to finally find a single place in the healthcare information universe where health information about a person can be collected and accessed.”
