SAN FRANCISCO — Amid rising concern over the sharing of consumer data, a trade group representing health tech companies on Thursday introduced guidelines to safeguard personal health information.
The best practices guidelines, developed by some member companies of the Consumer Technology Association, call on firms that handle consumer health and wellness data to take steps such as using data only for the purpose they were collected, appointing an executive to focus on privacy, and drafting a privacy policy and making it easily accessible.
The new guidelines are aimed at firms that handle all sorts of personal health information, such as consumers’ demographic information, exercise patterns, genomic data, and vital signs. They’re an attempt at industry self-governance in an era in which many health privacy advocates argue that the federal health privacy law known as HIPAA is inadequate and outdated.
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