Providing high-quality care requires accessible and accurate personal health information. Kaiser Permanente pioneered comprehensive electronic health records, beginning in the 1960s. Today, these records enable us to integrate care delivery across our entire system and keep our members healthy.
Highly connected, digital systems (like electronic health record systems) pose potential privacy challenges for any organization. Threats to privacy can happen when people provide information to third parties for one purpose, such as a health-focused app, but find it used inappropriately for an unintended purpose.
Underpinning Kaiser Permanente’s electronic health record systems are internal policies and protocols that reflect a robust, consistent, transparent data privacy approach. We use a comprehensive approach to data security to enable strong privacy protections. We advocate for policies that support the secure use of patient information for the intended purpose of delivering high-quality health care.
8 of 10 Americans think the risks of companies collecting data about them outweigh the benefits(1). Half of adults are extremely or very concerned about their health care data security(2). 81% of the top depression and smoking cessation apps sent data to Google or Facebook(3).
Kaiser Permanente believes sound public policies relating to health data privacy must:
Kaiser Permanente advocates for policies that:
1 Pew Research Center, 2019.
2 The Harris Poll, 2018.
3 JAMA Network, 2019.