A Medical Technology Perspective on National Privacy Legislation

Marking 2022’s Data Privacy Week drove home the importance of ensuring appropriate use of personal information and also underscored that the U.S. still has no comprehensive, national set of data privacy standards. From a digital health perspective, a uniform, national approach to privacy regulation is critical to ensuring that personal privacy and health technology innovation go hand in hand.

Members of AdvaMed’s Center for Digital Health are key players in the digital health revolution, leveraging data-driven insights and innovation to save and improve people’s lives and deliver more efficient, higher quality care. Advances in digital health technologies are driving groundbreaking medical research, expanding access to health care through telehealth and remote patient monitoring, supporting increasingly powerful diagnostic tools, and improving therapies and patient outcomes for a wide range of health conditions.

As innovators in data-intensive health technologies and digital health applications, medical technology companies take seriously their obligation to ensure the appropriate use and privacy of personal health data. Medical technology companies are responsible for using health data to comply with regulatory and payment policies and regulations, and work under multiple regulatory frameworks that govern the use and privacy of personal health information. They also depend on a wide variety of health data to conduct research, develop and improve products, advance machine learning, monitor life-saving equipment, and deliver real-time insights and therapeutic interventions to patients and clinicians.

In the absence of a comprehensive, national approach to data privacy, an emerging patchwork of state privacy laws is raising confusion and compliance costs and threatening to hinder advances in digital health. A recent Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report found that the out-of-state costs of individual state privacy laws spreading across the country would be between $98 billion and $112 billion annually, with $20-23 billion of these costs falling on small businesses.

A new federal privacy framework would meet consumer expectations, harmonize privacy requirements and standards nationwide to eliminate the need for states to act individually, and greatly reduce the compliance burden on technology innovators. It also is essential that U.S. privacy policy supports continued innovation in health care, specifically taking into account the unique nature and importance of health data and existing health privacy regulations while giving individuals assurance that their personal health information is only being used appropriately. Join AdvaMed in calling on Congress to act now to establish federal privacy legislation that achieves these critical goals.