Enhancing Health Data Sharing: Sequoia Project Publishes Guides for Automated Consent & Privacy Alignment

On February 9, The Sequoia Project, a VA-based non-profit leading nationwide health information-sharing initiatives, published two guides: Guidance to States: Legislating Technical Standard Definitions for Existing State-Sensitive Health Data Laws, which highlights the need of aligning sensitive health data laws with national technical standards, and Operationalizing Automated Consent: Actionable Guidance for Health Care Providers, Payors, and Other Health Care Organizations, which outlines steps and provides tools for healthcare providers, health systems, payers, and their partners to collect, manage, and honor patient consent confidently, efficiently, and in a computable manner that enables automated processing.

The Guidance to States includes model language intended to support legislators and lay the foundation for enabling high-confidence, automated systems that apply each state’s privacy rules and respect an individual’s privacy preferences regarding how sensitive health data is shared. The guide’s content benefited from extensive public input during The Sequoia Project’s public feedback period, the organization stated.

According to a news release, the guides are a follow-up to the non-profit’s Moving Toward Computable Consent: A Landscape Review, a whitepaper published in April 2025 that identified current challenges to collecting, managing, and honoring patient consent in electronic health information exchange (HIE).

“Taken together, these two guides are practical playbooks for industry and government to work independently and collaboratively to smooth the path to a – hopefully very near – future of automated and computable consent systems,” said Kevin Day, principal business advisor at Edifecs, a Cotiviti business, and co-chair of the Privacy & Consent Workgroup, in a statement.

“The patchwork of state and federal regulation today hinders the development of computable, automated systems to protect sensitive health data and honors patients' requests to share – or not,” noted Melissa Soliz, partner at Coppersmith Brockelman PLC, and co-chair of the Privacy & Consent Workgroup, in a statement.

The resources were developed by the Privacy & Consent Workgroup, part of Sequoia’s Interoperability Matters program. 

The guide, Operationalizing Automated Consent: Actionable Guidance for Health Care Providers, Payors, and Other Health Care Organizations, is open for public feedback until March 13, 2026.