Continuing medical education advocacy group the CME Coalition recently posted a privacy policy template it hopes will help increase public awareness of and confidence in CME providers’ ability to safeguard the physician data they collect via their Web sites.
“While the CME provider community already appreciates the importance of prohibiting the inappropriate use of collected physician information, our template policy and call for its widespread use can only help to increase public confidence in CME,” says CME Coalition Senior Advisor Andrew Rosenberg.
The template is the brainchild of the coalition’s privacy policy working group, which worked on it under the guidance of the Washington, D.C., law firm Arnold & Porter. The template is designed to be a collection of best practices CME providers can choose to adopt and can display on their Web sites for the public to see. It covers the types of information a CME provider collects from its site visitors, what they do with the information, with whom they may share it, what site visitors can do to manage the information the site collects about them, and how the provider protects and maintains the data it collects.
