FPF Health & Wellness: Mapping the 2024 Health Privacy Landscape, A 2023 Retrospective

In 2024, health and wellness-focused companies are increasingly integrating AI to streamline their services–with the expansion of AI-enabled digital health, the universe of potential health inferences will also expand, triggering new concerns about patient and consumer privacy. At this intersection of reproductive health privacy and AI concerns, state legislators and federal regulators appear poised to take more action on health data privacy, with specific attention to reproductive health privacy and genetic data privacy. As we look ahead to further developments, it is prudent to look back and understand exactly where the regulatory landscape stands and how we got here…

In 2023, health data privacy developments were nearly all related to the continuing development of privacy law responses to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and subsequent moves by states to bar access to certain reproductive health care services and to criminally prosecute individuals seeking access to that care. As reproductive health care remains in jeopardy in several states, we expect that reproductive health data privacy will continue to drive broader action on health data privacy. In this 2023 retrospective, FPF has identified the top themes of health legislation and regulation while looking ahead to 2024.