White Paper: Visual Privacy: Under-Addressed Yet Critical Protection Area For The Federal Government

The healthcare industry has gone through a data revolution over the past decade. A large volume of healthcare records have now been digitized, and with the passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996 and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) in 2009, healthcare providers, their business associates (lawyers, accountants, etc.) and other custodians of protected health information (PHI) have the obligation to keep patient information safe. While significant efforts have been made to protect PHI as it is stored and transmitted, a third critical area of data protection—visual privacy—has been under-addressed by some providers.