Privacy, Security, and Patient Engagement: The Changing Health Data Governance Landscape

The rapid emergence of new technologies support collection and use of a wide variety of data from clinical, genomic, social and behavioral, environmental, and financial sources, and have a great impact on the governance of personal health information.

The papers in this special issue on governance touch on the topic from a variety of focuses, including leadership perspectives, local and federal case studies, and the future importance of patient engagement.

This special issue focuses on three major themes-that data governance is growing in importance and presenting new challenges that must be addressed, that health care organizations must prioritize governance design, implementation, and functions as a priority, and that governance seems to be naturally converging on an archetype as described by this set of papers.

In order to deal with issues such as data de- and re-identification, data governance must be studied as its own field.