ANALYSIS OF CURRENT
STATE LAWS
An analysis of current public
health privacy laws can inform
these efforts. The success of a national
or international set of principles
for the use and disclosure of
personally identifiable health information
under the control of the
public health system depends, in
part, on acknowledging the specific
political and historical factors
that have resulted in existing laws.
In the United States, understanding
current state laws may assist in
identifying approaches to bridging
the gap between the reality that
state and local public health agencies
face and ideal policies, frameworks,
or practices for the use and
disclosure of public health information.
Identifying approaches and
patterns in existing state laws is also
an essential first step in further
analyses of what laws are effective.
Using methods applied in other
public health policy studies,24---26
we conducted a systematic online
search of all statutes in the 50 states
and the District of Columbia related
to the privacy, confidentiality, disclosure,
or release of human health
data in effect as of January 1, 2009.
For this purpose, we used a series of
Boolean search terms and an online
legal research database (Westlaw)
of statutory indices. Regulations,
which are not consistently available
in published form for all states and
all years, were excluded from the
analysis, except when a state referred
specifically to a regulation.
We also excluded from the analysis
freedom of information---type acts
or ‘‘sunshine’’ laws, which mandate
when a government agency can be
compelled to disclose information.
We included in the analysis only
court opinions included in the annotations
of relevant statutes. We
looked for the presence or absence
of laws, and then identified themes
in the laws and assessed their
alignment with the MSHPA,
MSEHPA, and recommendations in
the public health law literature.