Personally Identifiable Information in State Laws: Use, Release, and Collaboration at Health Departments.

Despite benefits to sharing data among public health programs, confidentiality laws are often presumed to obstruct collaboration or data sharing. We present an overview of the use and release of confidential, personally identifiable information as consistent with public health interests and identify opportunities to align data-sharing procedures with use and release provisions in state laws to improve program outcomes. In August 2013, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff and legal researchers from the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium conducted a review of state laws regulating state and local health departments in 50 states and the District of Columbia. Nearly all states and the District of Columbia employ provisions for the general use and release of personally identifiable information without patient consent; disease-specific use or release provisions vary by state. Absence of law regarding use and release provisions was noted. Health departments should assess existing state laws to determine whether the use or release of personally identifiable information is permitted. Absence of direction should not prevent data sharing but prompt an analysis of existing provisions in confidentiality laws.

Healthcare employers' policies on nurse education.

The 2010 recommendation that the proportion of registered nurses with BSN (bachelor of science in nursing) degrees in the nursing workforce should increase from the current 40% to 80% by the year 2020 has shifted the focus on nurses educational progression from state legislatures-where changes in entry-level requirements were debated for decades-to the executive suites of large healthcare providers. The recommendation, contained in the report titled The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Initiative on the Future of Nursing at the Institute of Medicine, suggests that human resources policies for nurses have the potential to double the rates of college degree completions (IOM, 2010). We surveyed 447 nurse executives in hospitals, nurse-led clinics, and home and hospice companies to explore the current practices of healthcare employers with regard to this recommendation. Almost 80% of respondents reported that their institution either preferred or required newly hired nurses to have a bachelor's degree, and 94% of the facilities offered some level of tuition reimbursement. Only 25%, however, required their nurses to earn a BSN or offered salary differentials on the basis of educational attainment (9%). We conclude that if employers are serious about wanting a more highly educated nurse workforce, they need to adopt requirements for degree completion and wage differentials in the coming years. The likelihood that such policies will be widely adopted, however, is dramatically affected by the dynamics of nursing supply and demand.