Private industry is increasingly soliciting hospitals to sell or share health data and biospecimens, but current laws offer more disclosure and consent protections for research participants than for patients receiving clinical care. Hospitals can offer more protections than required by law, however, and should move toward greater transparency with their patients about the research use of clinical health data and biospecimens to respect patients and avoid distrust.
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Acknowledgements
I thank V. Blanc, P. Lombardo, and H. Fernandez Lynch for thoughtful comments on a previous draft of this Comment. This work was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (K01HG010496) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (UL1TR002240).
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Spector-Bagdady, K. Hospitals should act now to notify patients about research use of their data and biospecimens. Nat Med 26, 306–308 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0795-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0795-6
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