The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) at www.epic.org/privacy/medical provides an excellent overview of the current state of medical records privacy law and policy. The article "Information Policy for the U.S. Health Sector: Engineering, Political Economy, and Ethics" at www.med.harvard.edu/publications/
Milbank/art/index.html examines the policy tradeoffs we currently face in the debate over protecting healthcare data and medical records. The National Coalition for Patient Rights at www.nationalcpr.org/ is a grassroots organization that assesses the impact of proposed healthcare legislation on consumers' rights to privacy. You can read a transcript of Senate hearings on the privacy of medical records and learn about the Medical Information Privacy and Security Act at Senator Patrick Leahy's site, www.senate.gov/~leahy/s971028.html. The Clinton Administration established a President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. You can learn about the commission and read its final report at www.hcqualitycommission.gov. To see an example of the type of information system that is helping to provoke the medical records privacy debate, take a look at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's TeleMed Web site at www.acl.lanl.gov/TeleMed.