With help from a $4 million gift from the Lilly Endowment Inc., Indiana University is creating a center to study the ethical, legal and social issues involving health information technology.
The Center for Law, Ethics and Applied Research in Health Information (CLEAR Health Information will leverage the resources of the Bloomington-based university and the State of Indiana in health sciences, information technology, law, ethics and other disciplines.
"Health information technology has been a major focus of the Obama Administration and of health care reform,” said Fred H. Cate, distinguished professor and C. Ben Dutton professor at the IU Maurer School of Law and director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, in a prepared statement. “While we are succeeding at building better and better systems, vexing ethical, legal and social issues remain. CLEAR Health Information will help to ensure that the right data are available at the right time for the benefit of patients today and in the future."
Cate is one of four co-directors of the center. The other three are:
- Kay Connelly, associate professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing, coordinator of health informatics and senior associate director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research;
- Stanley W. Crosley, former chief privacy officer of Eli Lilly and Co., co-founder and chair of the International Pharmaceutical Privacy Consortium and a member of the board of the Indiana Health Informatics Corp.; and
- Eric M. Meslin, director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics, professor of medicine, medical and molecular genetics, and public health in the Indiana University School of Medicine, and professor of philosophy at IUPUI.
