Maverick's Update

The birth control pill that is going to be available prescription-free was first approved in 1973. That is right about the same time Judy Blume published her book about other things that American society tends to keep private — Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret — a book that is finally a movie 50 years later (you can stream it now!). We are noticing that a lot of health care items that people expect to be private are not: recently released HHS data, analyzed by Politico, shows that HIPAA-covered entities reported more than 300 data breaches affecting 41.4 million people this year. This is a serious uptick in privacy issues, right when a majority of patients are concerned about their health data privacy (according to a Health Gorilla State of Patient Privacy Report). These privacy issues also come amid all of the hand-wringing about the use of artificial intelligence in the health care arena. For instance, experts are recommending that annual HIPAA training be incorporated into instruction on ChatGPT. Without a national, comprehensive privacy law, some are looking to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — which will have two new Republican members soon —  for consumer data privacy protections. As FTC Chair Lina Kahn was born almost two decades after Judy Blume’s “Are You There God?” book was published, it may not occur to her to be asking higher powers about how to tackle private health care questions … but it may not be the worst idea.