Washington is a strange city. You’re confronted with billboards for things normal humans can’t buy, like fighter jets. Small groups of lobbyists cluster in corners of office buildings and swap inside information in hushed tones. And there are the invites. Loads upon loads of invites to seminars and open-bar events and celebrations, all for obscure reasons. Washington trades on these invites. While at a glance they can seem confusing or meaningless, they typically have an ulterior motive. You can build a story around the real and sometimes insidious reasons for the gathering. The Prospect gets a lot of these emails, and each week, we’re going to share one of them with you, and take you inside what might be going on behind the scenes.
This is another Washington perennial: the “Capitol Hill briefing.” Privacy legislation in Congress generally has focused on Big Tech data breaches and unauthorized disclosures, for good reason. But other industries don’t want to get caught up in the undertow. They want to make sure Capitol Hill staff take them into account in whatever new regulations they might devise (and if possible, carve them out).
Enter the “Connected Health Initiative” (CHI), a subdivision of ACT | The App Association (weirdly, that’s how the name is written, with that line and everything). CHI bills itself as “a coalition of industry stakeholders and partners” who work “to clarify outdated health regulations” and “encourage mobile health innovation.” It’s an app developers lobby that wants to allow digital hardware and software to access and track patient data.
The history of move-fast-and-break-things “innovation” efforts in the tech space shows that the security of patient data is a secondary concern. But though this data is more sensitive, health care doesn’t have quite the same stigma, making it easier for the industry to seek special pleading.
CHI has already won a round of this. The 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 created new rules for health-related mobile apps, which fall outside the data-sharing restrictions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). But any new privacy legislation could set those meddling politicians loose on the health innovation space again, and we can’t have that.
This event, held at a room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, seeks to answer “one of the most pressing questions” in privacy policy—at least for the member firms of the Connected Health Initiative. The proceedings feature a lobbyist for CHI, a lobbyist for the American Medical Association, a director at the “AI and healthcare policy” division of Intel, an executive with the mobile health data firm Particle Health, and two different officials with the Department of Health and Human Services. The latter two give the event the imprimatur of being a genuine exchange of ideas and not lobbying in another form.
This is just a means to implant ideas into the minds of staffers who will have a hand in privacy legislation. They can “hear from innovative companies” and “understand what policymakers …can do to ensure patient privacy while balancing the needs of healthcare providers and patients.” You’d think it’d be up to the, you know, policymakers to understand how to strike that balance, not lobbyists and executives. But Washington does things just a little bit differently.
Oh, and there will be lunch. There will always be lunch.
