KCA Calls Health Charity Organizations to Safeguard Patient Data

Added by on September 14, 2010

The Kidney Cancer Association (KCA) has launched a new website, Ethics101.org, through which it asks non-profit organizations to be more transparent by fully disclosing the relationships they have with corporate sponsors such as medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.

KCA CEO Bill Bro stated that the association has editorialized this issue before and that its pleas were not heard:  ‘With the launch today of our new web page, Ethics101.org, we hope the public will join us in encouraging non-profit organizations to establish the firewalls necessary to assure that corporate sponsorships do not influence the agendas of these entities that serve, in essence, as public trustees.’ KCA’s main concern is that patient confidentiality isn’t protected at the time due to the fact that offshore coalitions of charities don’t have proper policies to protect patients and prevent data mining.

The KCA has published a press release in which it called on Senator Charles Grassley, a senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, and requested him ‘to increase federal oversight of so-called ‘super organizations’ of charities that operate as coalitions offshore. These groups may operate with impunity, because they are not subject to the reasonable standards of conduct to which most charities operating in the United States subscribe, in order to preserve their non-profit status under rules imposed by the Internal Revenue Service’.