Op Ed on Employer-Sponsored Wellness Programs

Today The Guardian published an op-ed I wrote about employer-sponsored wellness programs. You can find that op-ed here. I have researched and written about HIPAA, health plans, wellness, predictive analytics, and big data for years now. A lot of my work coalesced together when Robert Gellman and I researched and wrote the Scoring of America report. During this time, we found examples of health plans using all sorts of surprising data to assess members. We wrote about this in the Scoring report, for example, on p. 16 where a health plan used members’ retail purchase histories as part of the factors to enhance predictive risk models.

This week, a Wall Street Journal article provided new and troubling information about health data and predictive analytics in a discussion of employer-sponsored health programs. The WSJ article was surprising in its revelation of how far some of the data acquisition has now gone in just two short years since the publication of Scoring of America. I encourage you to take a look at the WSJ piece, and at the responsive op-ed that I wrote. Employee-sponsored wellness programs are complex to navigate, and it is important to note that wellness programs are not just automatically covered under HIPAA — they have to meet specific criteria, and not all do. I discuss this in more detail in the op-ed.

I am pleased when wellness programs are helpful to people, but we must reign in data abuses that are impacting employees when employer-sp0nsored health plans are not covered under HIPAA. There need to be good, solid rules that protect fairness, accuracy, access to the records, and more.

-Pam Dixon

Posted February 19, 2016 in Data Brokers, Databases, Digital Exhaust, Genetic Privacy, HIPAA, Modern privacy, Wellness programs

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
National IDs Around the World — Interactive map

About this Data Visualization: This interactive map displays the presence...
Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.

Op Ed on Employer-Sponsored Wellness Programs

The Guardian Op Ed

WSJ article

Scoring of America report