Protection of personal health data law: workup and analysis of the legal framework for the collection and processing of personal health data

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Thorsten Kingreen; Professor Dr. Jürgen Kühling
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: from 2011 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 191697323

Personal health data contain information about the health status of an individual. They are collected and processed in numerous areas of life, not only in the physician-patient-relationship, but also for the establishment and termination of employment- and insurance relationships, during medical training and research as well as for instance to protect children against violence. On the one hand, personally identifiable information regarding health provides important foundations for decisions and actions. On the other hand, personal data require legal protection against unauthorised collection and processing. However, the legal bases for the treatment of health data are extremely confusing, unclear and obscure, not least due to their dissemination among numerous individual statutes. So far legal research has extrapolated only sections of the law on the protection of personal health data and even those partially in a mere rudimentary way, since the subject matter is located at the intersection of several fields of law. The research project aims to close this gap by linking the relevant questions of social-, health- and data protection law to the constitutional law of informational self-determination and developing suggestions for an amendment of the law on the protection of personal health data, which refurbishes the area of tension in fundamental rights between knowing and not-knowing regarding health data.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants