Urgent Policies Required to Grant Public Access to Protected Health Information during Emergency Disease Outbreaks and Pandemics

Dr Sebastian Kevany and Dr Deon Canyon

Security Nexus: Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies

While some believe that contact tracing apps produce benefits as soon as users increase above 10 percent of a population, there remain PHI-related shortcomings in these approaches because such apps do not actually measure the circumstances that are known to be important in COVID-19 transmission. This lack of accuracy in granular data makes it difficult for both disease managers and individuals to benefit. Apps with inappropriately short infection-interaction algorithms will show too many people as possibly infected (as has possibly been the case in Singapore), while apps with inappropriately long infection-interaction algorithms will likely flag too few potential viral exposures.

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