Deborah C. Peel, MD is the leading national and international advocate for restoring patients' rights to control the use of sensitive personal health information in electronic systems. She also has practiced as a physician and psychoanalyst for over thirty-five years.
She was named one of the "100 Most Influential in Healthcare" in the US by ModernHealthcare magazine four times since 2007-the first privacy expert and consumer advocate on the list.
She learned about the lack of health privacy from her patients. Many feared seeking treatment unless their records were private. They had lost jobs or reputations using health insurance to pay for care. They realized physicians disclose medical records to get insurance payments, and insurers share health information with employers, so they offered cash for privacy.
In 2004, she formed Patient Privacy Rights (PPR), www.patientprivacyrights.org, which has become the world's leading consumer health privacy advocacy organization. PPR has over 12,000 members in all 50 states.
In 2006, Dr. Peel founded the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy, representing 10.3 million Americans. The Coalition is responsible for the historic privacy protections in the stimulus bill: a ban on sales of PHI, audit trails, segmentation, breach notice, the right to prevent disclosure of PHI for payment and HCO if payment is out-of-pocket, and encryption. Microsoft joined the Coalition in 2007.
In 2011 PPR and the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs created the 1st International Summit on the Future of Health Privacy. The summits are the only place where both threats to health privacy and solutions are thoughtfully debated by national and international experts from advocacy, academia, government, and industry.
In 2012, PPR expanded the summit and partnered with the O'Neill Institute at Georgetown Law Center, the University of Cambridge Computer lab, the Harvard Data Privacy Lab, and The University of Texas School of Information. Sponsors included Microsoft, FairWarning, Jericho Systems, Accenture, Dell, CA Technologies, PwC, IDExperts, e-MDs, Meditology, and TATRC. See: http://www.healthprivacysummit.org.
Dr. Peel was the First Tocker Fellow at the University of Texas School of Information. See:http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/about/news/view_news_item.php?ID=363