National Center For Health Services Research And Development Briefs

In the realm of health care, privacy protections are needed to preserve patients' dignity and prevent possible harms. Ten years ago, to address these concerns as well as set guidelines for ethical health research, Congress called for a set of federal standards now known as the HIPAA Privacy Rule. In its 2009 report, Beyond the HIPAA Privacy Rule: Enhancing Privacy, Improving Health Through Research, the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Health Research and the Privacy of Health Information concludes that the HIPAA Privacy Rule does not protect privacy as well as it should, and that it impedes important health research.

Health services research has suffered because of unrealistic expecta- tions of what it could provide in the way of easy answers for policy- makers in the health field. There are no quick fixes for problems of health manpower and distribution or cost containment. This means that it is enourmously important to know much more than we do about the complex variety of factors affecting our health care system if we are to make sensible policy decisions. We need to know what we are talk- ing about, and for this reason the report gives a proper definition of health services research. Health services research is a field and not a discipline and this means that by its very nature it is multi- disciplinary. The report strongly supports the continuation of the national center for health services research without either reorgani- zation or relocation.