LEGAL ISSUES IN HEALTH INFORMATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH PRACTICE AND POLICY

In this issue, Law and the Public’s Health examines the legal issues that arise in the context of health information. The effort to secure more comprehensive and better health in-formation about patient care has intensified in recent years, as a result of concerns over health care quality and the effectiveness of health care for an increasingly diverse pa-tient population.1 Expert consensus regarding the value of incorporating personal health information into the health care process has reached the point at which it is possible to see the day when the routine collection and analysis of such information becomes a basic element of the professional standard of care for all patients. Indeed, in December 2004, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Orga-nizations ( JCAHO) published draft standards that would, if adopted, require managed care organizations and integrated delivery systems to collect patient information on race, ethnicity, and language. These draft standards follow on the heels of earlier JCAHO standards covering other accredited institutions. The professional standard of care evolves slowly over time and in response to advances in science, information, and technology.2,3 When the professional standard of care is poised to take a leap of the magnitude envisioned by the information revolution in health care, it is important to understand the legal landscape in which such a transforma-tion would occur. The law can strongly affect the course of events, and longstanding legal principles may need revisit-ing as part of the evolution of health care itself. Most readers are familiar with the legal issue of health information privacy because of the enormous attention paid to the subject in recent years as a result of federal HIPAA health information privacy standards. (For an excellent dis-cussion of HIPAA in a public health practice context, se