HIPAA´s Effect on Web Site Privacy Policies

Author

Antón, Annie I. ; Earp, Julie B. ; Vail, Matthew W. ; Jain, Neha ; Gheen, Carrie M. ; Frink, Jack M.

Author_Institution

Coll. of Eng., North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC

Volume

5

Issue

1

fYear

2007

Firstpage

45

Lastpage

52

Abstract

Healthcare institutions typically post their privacy practices online as privacy policy documents. We conducted a longitudinal study that examines the effects of HIPAA´s enactment on a collection of privacy policy documents for a fixed set of organizations over a four-year period. We present our analysis of 24 healthcare privacy policy documents from nine healthcare Web sites, analyzed using goal mining, a content-analysis method that supports extraction of useful information about institutions´ privacy practices from documents. We compare our results to our pre-HIPAA study of these same institutions´ online privacy practices and evaluate their evolution in the presence of privacy laws

Keywords

Web sites; content management; data mining; data privacy; document handling; health care; legislation; medical information systems; HIPAA enactment; content-analysis method; goal mining; healthcare Web sites; healthcare privacy policy documents; Credit cards; Data mining; Data privacy; Information analysis; Insurance; Internet; Legislation; Medical services; Protection; Text analysis; HIPAA; Health Information and Portability Accountability Act; goal-driven analysis; online privacy; privacy policy; readability; software requirements engineering;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Security & Privacy, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1540-7993

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MSP.2007.7

Filename

4085593