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Liability (And) Rules For Health Information, Jorge L. Contreras, Francisca Nordfalk

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

The recent trend toward propertization of health data could pose significant challenges to biomedical research and public health. Property rule systems can result in sizable up-front costs in the acquisition of consent from individual data subjects, as well as the ongoing risk that data subjects will retract consent or object to unanticipated data uses, thus compromising existing data resources and analyses. Instead, we propose that research using individual health data should be subject to a regulatory regime, enforceable by government/public repositories, while at the same time permitting private enforcement actions to address particularized individual injury. Thus, while the physical collection …