DESCRIPTION
Health Care Privacy 101 and Beyond (Session 3)
Tuesday, Septemeber 1, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. (PT) | B-CLE Webcast
0.50 CLE & CPE Credit Available
Program Info | Resource(s) | Speaker Bio(s) & Contact Info
HIPAA was never the whole story — and the rest of the story is getting messier by the month. In Session 3 of Health Care Privacy 101 and Beyond, Kirk Nahra, partner at WilmerHale and one of the nation's leading privacy lawyers, maps the fast-growing body of law that sits outside HIPAA: state HIPAA-like statutes, comprehensive privacy laws, and the consumer health and reproductive-rights laws passed after Dobbs. He explains why your Apple Watch, your grocery purchases, and even your location next door to a hospital can now count as health information — and why a national privacy law would likely add to the pile rather than clean it up. His larger warning: this patchwork is starting to work against the health care system itself, raising costs, chilling clinical trials, and leaving medical records incomplete. Thirty minutes, one clear map of where health care privacy law actually stands.
Speaker(s)
Kirk Nahra, Co-Chair of the Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Privacy Practices, WilmerHale
Key Takeaways:
- HIPAA's reach stops well short of "health privacy." It covers doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurers, business associates, and most employer health plans — but not wearables, wellness apps, personal health records, medical information websites, patient support groups, or what you post on social media.
- Post-Dobbs consumer health laws sweep in inferred and location data — with real-world costs. Washington's My Health My Data law can treat ordinary location data as health information, and some pharmaceutical companies have opted out of running clinical trials with Washington patients rather than navigate it; California's data-segregation approach protects reproductive health information from law enforcement but risks leaving medical records incomplete for far more patients.
- A federal privacy law probably won't be the fix. HIPAA-covered entities have largely sat out the national debate seeking exemptions, leaving no one at the table advocating for a coherent health care approach — so a national law would likely stack another layer on top of the existing patchwork.