Michelle Mello: Patient privacy and the law are on a collision course

A rapidly shifting legal debate is raging in healthcare over patient data and privacy. One legal expert says that even though regulations have lagged, a reckoning is due. How much control should patients have over who sees their medical records? How readily should researchers share patient-level data from their clinical studies? In today’s world, should the answers to these questions depend on whether the data are “anonymized?” These are but a few of the ethical and legal conundrums that Michelle Mello, Stanford professor of law and of health research and policy, grapples with on a daily basis. She says that rapidly evolving ways to gather and share medical data are exposing the limitations of laws that protect patient privacy. Meanwhile, the value of sharing patient and clinical data is growing by the day. Data from multiple studies can be pooled to study subgroups or explore rare conditions that were once out of reach. It could help lower drug prices, too, or identify ways to treat patients with greater precision and efficiency. Mello says that reaping these benefits will require a national conversation about what patients are willing to trade off in terms of privacy and control over their personal health information. Join Michelle Mello and host Russ Altman for a wide-ranging discussion of the ethical and legal challenges in healthcare on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything.