In collaboration with a group of prominent health policy researchers and clinicians, the Milbank Memorial Fund has created this Web site to present a series of electronic articles. The goal of the project is to take advantage of the World Wide Web forum and information network while controlling for high quality of content. Each featured article in the series will be in "review" narrative, presenting the policy trade-offs of a particular subject.

The first article of the series is INFORMATION POLICY FOR THE U.S. HEALTH SECTOR: ENGINEERING, POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND ETHICS by F. Reid Cushman, Ph.D. and Don E. Detmer, M.D., who summarize it as follows:

This paper examines, in necessarily brief form, the engineering, economic, political and ethical issues that have emerged in the debates over health care data protection policy, and examines the major features of legislation now before the Congress. Readers who wish a fuller treatment of these issues may consult the materials listed in the "References," "Other Documents," and "Internet/WWW Resources" sections, many of which are available online.

F. Reid Cushman, Ph.D., is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar and a Visiting Fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, and a Senior Associate of the Health Policy Center, University of Virginia.

Don E. Detmer, M.D., is Louise Nerancy Professor of Health Sciences Policy, University Professor, and Professor of Surgery at the University of Virginia. He is the current chair of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics.

You can click on the title of the article to access the article's outline, use the index on this page to view the components of your choice, or you can choose to download the entire document for viewing in Microsoft Word.