NIH and CMS to Build Autism Data Platform

Healthcare and privacy attorney Shannon Hartsfield was quoted in a Healthcare IT News article discussing the new collaboration between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to build a secure autism data platform. She commented that although CMS has been providing data to researchers since 2015 under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations, the specifics of the data use agreement with NIH remain unclear. Ms. Hartsfield also noted the need for rigorous privacy protocols and robust security measures to ensure the protection of sensitive health information.

"[HIPAA] allows subsets of protected health information, called limited data sets, to be used and disclosed for research purposes," she said. "These data use agreements impose restrictions on how the research information will be protected."

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