The Constitutional Court yesterday found that the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) allowing access to the national health database for academic research was partly unconstitutional.
In the court’s Interpretation No. 13, Judicial Yuan President Hsu Tzong-li (許宗力) said that given the lack of an independent monitoring mechanism to ensure data protection under the National Health Insurance Act (全民健保法), the act should be revised within three years to improve personal data protection.
Health authorities have not clearly stipulated the procedures for the use, organization, deletion, termination and withdrawal of information in the health insurance database, which violated laws on personal-data retention, Hsu said.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
If an amendment to the act is not made within three years to rectify this, individuals would be permitted to request that their health-insurance information not be used for purposes other than the National Health Insurance program, he said.
The interpretation comes after a decade-long campaign by Taiwan Association for Human Rights secretary-general Tsai Chi-hsun (蔡季勳) and six other rights advocates demanding that the NHIA prohibit outside access to the information.
The group said that although the data provided to researchers had identifying information stripped out, there was still the possibility that people could be indirectly identified by comparing the data with other records.
They added that sharing access to the information violated due legal process, as the public was not informed.
The NHIA said that if the information could not be shared, or the database closed completely, it would “not only affect academic research, national policy formulation, publication of medical results, and the development of public medicine and health, but also hinder the advancement of medical research.”
The NHIA added that the rights of individuals to withdraw personal information should be handled by legislators, and not determined by the court.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare also argued in favor of maintaining research access to the database, saying that it had contributed to Taiwan’s successes in staving off a local epidemic in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Requiring the complete de-identification of information or giving the public the right to withdraw from the database may cause sampling errors,” it said. “It may also trigger a strong backlash from the scientific and academic circles, and lead to a crisis of disease prevention in our country.”
Citing an example of how the database aided medical research, NHIA Director-General Lee Po-chang (李伯璋) said that it had helped doctors determine that the use of immunotherapy drugs on cancer patients did not produce significantly better results than traditional targeted-drug treatments.
The finding was used to convince pharmaceutical companies to reduce prices on immunotherapy drugs, he said.
The database had also helped doctors improve the survival rate of hepatitis C patients through early treatment before the onset of liver cancer, he said.
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