Nancy McCall

Nancy McCall is director of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and a Research Associate in the Department of History of Medicine of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In publications and archival practice she has long advocated that archival records of the health fields be made more broadly accessible for research; that students and scholars from within and outside the health professions have an equal opportunity to study records documenting the functions and activities of the health fields; and that access and use of these records proceed in compliance with applicable legal and regulatory codes for protection of individual privacy and intellectual property.

Since the enactment of the Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), McCall has studied its implications for archival practice and discussed findings at various professional meetings. In 2005 she provided the following testimony to the Subcommittee on Privacy and Confidentiality of the National Committee on Vitaland Health Statistics (NCVHS) about the impact of the Privacy Rule on archives that contained individually identifiable health information: http://ncvhs.hhs.gov/050111p6.pdf. A recipient of a NHPRC Electronic Records Fellowship in 2006, she has been engaged with colleagues at Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin in the development of a HIPAA-aware finding aid. Preliminary work on this effort may be reviewed at:http://www.library.vcu.edu/tml/speccoll/mccall-poster.pdf.

McCall and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins, in collaboration with legal experts, have studied the HIPAA Privacy Rule for ways that it would allow archival holdings to be accessed and used. Integrating their findings into practice, they have put a HIPAA-compliant structure in place at Johns Hopkins for review and adjudication of requests for access and use of documents, data, and information regulated by HIPAA. They will share their findings and demonstrate how archivists at other repositories may set up and implement similar HIPAA-compliant procedures for access and use of materials that contain identifiable health information.

McCall is a member of the Privacy Board of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and currently serves as chair of the American Association for the History of Medicine's Ad Hoc Committee on the Implications of HIPAA. She is on the Steering Committee of the SAA Roundtable on Science Technology and Health Care (STHC) and is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists.