Privacy
A majority of clinical scientists believe the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's medical privacy rule has negatively affected biomedical research, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The authors found that only one-quarter of epidemiologists surveyed believe the rule has improved confidentiality and privacy safeguards for research participants. In addition, the study noted that most institutional review board applications considered the privacy rule's influence on participants as negative.
The study concluded that despite the positive intentions of the privacy rule, it often has added uncertainty, costs and delays to medical research (Ness et al., Journal of the American Medical Association, 11/14).