ABSTRACT
Experts anticipate that advances in health IT will improve healthcare delivery and enable patients to assume greater responsibility for managing their health. But while provider effectiveness and consumer empowerment are important goals, health IT adoption is raising new privacy issues and concerns. The fact remains that the unintended or inappropriate collection, 130use, or disclosure of sensitive protected health information (PHI) can lead to a variety of harms ranging from inconvenience, to embarrassment, to discrimination.
