Deborah Peel
Deborah Peel, MD, is a practicing psychoanalyst and American health privacy expert. In 2004, she founded Patient Privacy Rights, now the leading US consumer health-privacy watchdog with 10,000 members, http://patientprivacyrights.org/. She fights to restore patients’ rights to control their health information in electronic systems to prevent generations of discrimination in jobs and future opportunities. She leads the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy, representing 10 million Americans. The Coalition’s efforts resulted in strong new privacy requirements for electronic health records systems built with the billions in stimulus funds: a ban on the sale of personal health information without consent, audit trails, segmentation, breach notice, encryption, and the right to prevent disclosure of health records for payment and healthcare operations if treatment is paid for out-of-pocket. She’s been elected one of ModernHealthcare’s “100 Most Powerful in Healthcare” since 2007.
