Is Big Brother rearing his ugly head again? Some privacy advocates think so.

They're upset with the federal Office of Personnel Management, which is charged by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act with building a database of health insurance claims for the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP), the newly established National Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Program and the forthcoming Multi-State Option Plan. OPM said last month that a central database would offer the "best value for both enrollees and taxpayers" by allowing the office to manage the programs more efficiently.

Though OPM says data will be de-identified, it is vague with details, according to a Computerworld story, and that has several groups worried. "There are far too many unknowns about the program for it to be acceptable," at this point, Harley Geiger, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, tells Computerworld.

The CDT and 15 other organizations have sent a letter to OPM Director John Berry, calling the OPM notice about the database "defective for lack of specificity." They also say a central database is unnecessary and question the agency's plan to make data available to third-party researchers and analysts and for law enforcement and judicial purposes.

"The government, researchers and covered entities already possess the necessary authority to carry out the described uses for the warehouseʼs data. Rather than duplicate sensitive enrollee information by copying it into the warehouse, government agencies and researchers could access data already routinely collected in the ordinary course of business by the health plans participating in the affected insurance programs," the letter says.

Dr. Deborah Peel, whose Patient Privacy Rights Foundation is a signatory to the letter, is concerned that OPM will provide data to commercial data-miners for marketing purposes. "Although this proposal is being described as intended to help promote medical research and efficiency analysis, we do not see adequate safeguards to ensure that the aggregated records are not used as fodder for the health data mining industry," Peel says.

For more:
- read this Computerworld story
- take a look at this letter to Berry
- see this OPM notice in the Federal Register (.pdf)

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