Health plans and covered healthcare providers are required to develop and distribute a HIPAA notice that provides a clear, user friendly explanation of rights and practices. However, the HIPAA Privacy Rule can be difficult to read and comprehend and as a result online privacy policies are often not read or well understood by the general public.
Recently the ONC collaborated with the Office for Civil Rights to develop model Notices of Privacy Practices (NPP) to clearly convey the required information in an accessible format. ONC has just announced the “Digital Privacy Notice Challenge” which is a call for designers, developers, and patient privacy experts to create an online model notice of privacy practices that is compelling, readable, and understandably by patients and can easily be integrated into existing web sites.
Submissions will use the content and design elements developed recently as part of the joint ONC/ONR paper-based model NPP project. The Challenge will offer $25,000 in prizes. The prize for first place is $15,000, second place $7,000 and third place will be $3,000.
To register for the Challenge, participants will need to access www.challenge.gov and search for “Digital Privacy Notice Challenge”. Participants can also view the information in the February 10, 2014 issue of the Federal Register on page 7671.