Upcoming Mallesons seminarsAll organisations involved in or which supply services or products to the health industry in Australia, all organisations involved in human research.
What do you need to do?Review the ALRC recommendations and consider how they will affect your organisation. Be ready to make submissions on draft legislation.
Nicole Heller
Partner
T +61 7 3244 8347
Sydney
Patrick Gunning
James Moore
Melbourne
Katherine Forrest
Cheng Lim
Perth
Nicholas Creed
Canberra
Adam Bartlett
The Australian Law Reform Commission has recommended significant changes to the regulation of health information handling. If adopted, the recommendations would sweep away the current patchwork of overlapping and inconsistent State and Federal regulations and replace them with nationally consistent laws on health privacy.
They would also clarify rights of healthcare providers to collect information on third parties, address individuals’ rights to access their own health information and allow for and regulate the use of health information in human research.
The ALRC recommendations form part of its broad-ranging report For Your Information: Australia Privacy Law and Practice which was launched in Sydney on 11 August 2008.
For more information on this report click here.
In its report, the ALRC recognised that the current regulation of health records, which apply differently between the public and private sector and across different States, has lead to increased compliance costs and confusion in the health industry, as well as uncertainty for consumers about their rights. Central to the ALRC’s recommendations on health records is that they should be regulated under the Commonwealth Privacy Act, with specific regulations supplementing the more general Unified Privacy Principles (UPPs) (which are themselves the subject of recommendations in other sections of the report). Implementation of the recommendations should reduce compliance costs for those involved in handling health information and simplify the national deployment of services in and for the health industry.
Other key recommendations by the ALRC in the health area include:
- the introduction of specific enabling legislation if the national Shared Electronic Health Record scheme and the national Unique Healthcare Identifiers scheme are to be introduced,
- introducing into the proposed new Privacy (Health Information) Regulations, the ability for healthcare providers to collect information about third parties, without consent, where it is relevant and necessary for treatment,
- expressly providing health consumers with rights to access, and be kept informed about their health information except in certain circumstances, and
- providing for access to health information for socially worthwhile research outside the health and medical fields of research.
The Cabinet Secretary and Special Minister of State, Senator John Faulkner, confirmed that the Government would seek to legislate for a first stage of privacy reforms, which include the recommendations on health records, within 12 to 18 months.