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WASHINGTON — The push for universal electronic health records, a long-simmering issue in the healthcare debate, is gaining fresh momentum with the new administration and Congress, but privacy concerns continue to confound policymakers.

President Obama has set a goal of digitizing every American’s health record by 2014, and he included $19 billion to that end in the economic stimulus package.

But the question remains, how do health IT providers ensure that patients remain in control of their most sensitive personal data in a digital healthcare regime?

At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference today, a panel of experts took up that question, acknowledging that it doesn’t really have an answer at this point.

“This is one of those issues that has been going round and round and round for years,” said Joel Slackman, managing director at the BlueCross BlueShield Association.

But in the case of the stimulus money, that debate is going to be cut short.

“The time in which things have to be done is incredibly compressed,” Slackman said.

The IT provisions in the stimulus bill amended the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, broadening its scope to cover tech firms offering personal health portals.

“I don’t know if we’ve gotten there yet,” Torres said.

The advent of the Web-based personal healthcare portal was greeted with significant privacy concerns.

“At Microsoft we decided very early on with our HealthVault product that consumers should control what goes in, who sees it going out,” Torres said.

Torres said that patients can control the information that is entered into their files, as well as which doctor gets to see it.

The appropriate granularity of these controls is one of the thorniest issues facing policy-makers as they set privacy rules for e-health records.

“Consent is the 800-pound gorilla for medical privacy,” said Ashley Katz, executive director of the advocacy group Patient Privacy Rights.

The prospect of bringing IT firms into the business of managing medical records can also introduce a significant challenge in ensuring compliance with a bewildering complex of state laws.

“You don’t even know that a law’s conflicting until it smacks you in the face, sometimes,” Slackman said.

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