The Senate's health committee voted unanimously this week to advance a bill built on a premise most Americans get wrong: the heart rate on your smartwatch, the cycle you logged in a period app, and the symptoms you typed into a wellness platform are, in most cases, not protected by HIPAA at all.
The Health Information Privacy Reform Act cleared the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee by a vote of 22 to 0. The bill was introduced by committee chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and a physician, who has said that smartwatches and health apps change the way people manage their health while creating privacy questions that did not exist when care happened only in an exam room.
