A voluntary privacy standard for health services and policy research: legal, ethical and social policy issues in the Canadian context.

In this review, the authors describe how one group of Canadian researchers has begun to address current privacy protection challenges with the end goal of developing a Canadian national standard for privacy protection specific to health services and policy research (HSPR). They provide a concise description of some of the key messages and issues that resulted from a recent series of HSPR workshops and describe some of the workshop outcomes in terms of their legal, ethical and social/policy significance. The review ends with a brief description of some future directions for research and development in this area.