UM Ethics Programs faculty have been studying the intersection of information technology and ethics for two decades.  Some recent projects:

Personal Health Records / Project HealthDesign

Project HealthDesign, a research-and-development initiative to explore aspects of personal health records (PHR), has come to represent the first-ever project in health information technology to include an ethics component at the outset. Sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the program features multidisciplinary grantee teams from across the United States. The Ethics Programs received a grant to oversee Ethical, Legal and Social Issues (ELSI) analysis for the project.

Privacy / Data Protection Project
The Privacy / Data Protection Project, ended in 2005, was a public education effort focusing on information protections in the health sector, particularly the HIPAA Privacy Rule and Security Rule. The Project web site, which is still available, contains a set of free web-based HIPAA courses to meet the training requirements of these rules—linked to a glossary of more than 200 entries on privacy/security law and technology. 

The Project’s HIPAA courses are also now available via the CITI Program.

Other UM Collaborations and Initiatives

Markle Foundation: UM faculty contributed to the Markle Connecting for Health Policy Subcommittee and the Personal Health Technology Council  which contributed to the Markle Connecting for Health Common Framework for Private and Secure Health Information Exchange, published in 2006.