Public access to data - Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 22, § 8707

The Maine Health Data Organization’s board of directors must make provisions to allow any member of the public to gain access to information provided to the Health Data Organization upon request.  However, members of the public cannot have access to privileged medical information, confidential information, or information that identifies individual patients or providers.    

The board may allow exceptions to the confidentiality rule of identifying information for public health researchers. The law allows researchers to have access to this information provided that:

1. The access to confidential, identifying information is used for public health research;
2. Patient identifying medical information is not used without the patient’s consent, unless the information is being used for data comparison purposes;
3. The researchers do not disclose medical information about an identifiable patient without the patient’s consent;
4. The confidential information is used to the minimum extent possible to achieve the research objective;
5. The research is designed to protect the confidentiality of health care information.