DePaul's 2016 health law symposium
featured practitioners, technological experts
and other professionals working together in the health care
sector and using technological advances to improve upon traditional practices. "The New Frontier of Health Innovation: Navigating the Regulatory Landscape" offered insights from individuals navigating an increasingly complex
set of statutory and administrative rules and the legal practitioners that
aid their efforts.
"In many ways, this is a lecture we couldn’t have given two
to three years ago," said Dr. Raj Shah, principle investigator at the Chicago
Area Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Network and associate professor of
family medicine at Rush University Hospital. Shah led the panel discussion, "Protecting Information in the Face of Innovation: Precision Medicine and the
Population Health Research in Health Systems." Shah provided a brief history of health care security
regulation, including complications with the HIPAA Privacy Rule and HITECH, and presented current tensions needing resolution. He described evolutionary steps toward acquiring
more data, such as contractual agreements to enable efficient and value added
data flows for research, institutional collaboration and data repositories at
institutions. In addition, he discussed the balance between data privacy and protecting commons.
Other panels discussed legal and regulatory considerations, ethics in healthcare technology and the impact of gender and sex on innovation and health technology.
"The symposium provided DePaul a terrific opportunity to
bring together health care innovators with lawyers and regulators to discuss
both the potential and the challenges that technological advances and the use of
big data bring to the field," said Associate Professor Wendy Netter Epstein, faculty director of the Jaharis Health Law Institute (JHLI). "This sort of
collaboration among key industry players is central to the mission of the
institute."
The symposium was presented by the DePaul Journal of Health Care Law, the JHLI, the Center for Intellectual Property Law & Information Technology, and the DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property.