HHS Drops Plan to Restrict Hospital Use of Data-Tracking Tech
By Eric Wicklund
Federal officials have withdrawn a plan to restrict hospitals from using tracking technology to collect data from consumers visiting their web portals.
The Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has withdrawn its appeal of a district court vacating the federal rule, which was outlined in a December 2022 bulletin from the HHS Office for Civil Rights. The rule stated that entities covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) “are not permitted to use tracking technologies in a manner that would result in impermissible disclosures of PHI to tracking technology vendors or any other violations of HIPAA Rules.”
The American Hospital Association and several other groups filed suit against HHS in late 2023, charging that the federal agency exceeded its statutory authority in preventing healthcare providers from collecting the IP addresses of people visiting public-facing websites. On June 20 of this year, a federal district court in the Northern District of Texas ruled that the federal order “was promulgated in clear excess of HHS’s authority under HIPAA.”
The AHA and others had argued that the rule could have been interpreted to prevent hospitals from using common technologies, such as analytics software, video, translation and accessibility services and digital maps to access IP addresses, assess the usability of their portals and communicate with patients.
“The American Hospital Association is pleased that the Office for Civil Rights has decided not to appeal the district court’s decision vacating the new rule adopted in its Online Tracking Technologies Bulletin,” AHA General Counsel Chad Golden said in a statement. “As the AHA repeatedly explained to OCR—both before and after OCR forced the AHA to file its lawsuit—this rule was a gross overreach by the federal government, imposed without any input from healthcare providers or the general public. Now that the Bulletin’s illegal rule has been vacated once and for all, hospitals can safely share reliable, accurate health care information with the communities they serve without the fear of federal civil and criminal penalties.”
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.