Deborah C. Peel, M.D.

Patient Privacy Rights Advocate

Deborah C. Peel, Power Talks Speakers BureauDeborah C. Peel, MD is the world’s leading advocate for patients’ rights to control the use of personal health information in electronic systems. She is also a practicing physician and Freudian psychoanalyst. She became an expert and privacy warrior to stop patients from being harmed. The lack of health privacy causes millions of US citizens to avoid early diagnosis and treatment for cancer, depression, and STDs every year.

Her passion is informing the public about privacy-enhancing technologies and the major fixes needed in law and policy, so they can join the battle to restore our civil and human rights to health privacy.

In 2002, HIPAA was amended to eliminate patients’ rights to control the use of personal health information. The right of consent was replaced with “regulatory permission for covered entities to use and disclose health records for treatment, payment, and healthcare operations.” The federal government put data holding institutions in control of the use, disclosure, and sale of patients’ health information, from DNA to diagnoses to prescription records.

In 2004, she formed Patient Privacy Rights (PPR), a 501c3 non-profit organization to educate Americans about the urgent need to restore patient control over health data. PPR is the world’s leading advocate for health privacy, with over 20,000 members in all 50 states.

In 2006, Dr. Peel founded the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy. The coalition includes over 50+ national organizations, representing 10.3 million people who want to control the use of personal health information. In 2007, Microsoft Corporation joined the Coalition.

In 2009, the Coalition for Patient Privacy worked to add new privacy and security protections to HITECH, the technology part of the stimulus bill. New protections included: a ban on sales of protected health information (PHI) without consent, a list of all disclosures of health data from electronic health records systems, the ability to separate sensitive health data and prevent it from being disclosed, receive notice of data breaches, a new right to block disclosure of PHI for healthcare operations if you pay for treatment out-of-pocket, and requiring data to be encrypted.

Since 2007, Dr. Peel has been included on Modern Healthcare magazine’s “100 Most Influential in Healthcare” list four times. In 2013, she was named one of the “Top Ten Influencers in Health Info Sec” by Healthcare Info Security.

Dr. Peel is the catalyst and creator of the annual International Summits on the Future of Health Privacy. The summits are the only venue where national and international experts from advocacy, academia, government, and industry come together and debate urgent threats to health privacy and realistic solutions.

FEE RANGE: 10-15k

Travels from Austin, Texas

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(805) 262-2218