HHS: Grappling with privacy vs. accessibility

The "consumer choice technology" demonstration that the federal Health IT Policy Committee's new privacy and security Tiger Team will host June 29 in Washington aims to showcase projects and systems that address one of healthcare reform's biggest IT challenges: balancing the opportunities of health-information sharing with the need to keep individual patients' data secure.

One such initiative scheduled to be presented is a Web-based record-keeping system called Clinical Management for Behavioral Health Services (CMBHS), developed by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The CMBHS system is designed to give behavioral-health patients some control over their medical records' release, letting patients mask specific data elements within their records, for example, and decide whether to release their complete medical history to all of their healthcare providers.