Lawful Bases for Establishment of Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database Challenged in Constitutional Court – Lexology
The Taiwan Government long ago established the National Health Insurance Research Database (“Database”) – a database that widely collects patients’ health insurance data (including each patient’s diagnosis, time of medical visit, discharge time, and payments) and is extensively utilized for academic research. Currently, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court (“Court”) is reviewing the issue of whether the establishment of the Database is constitutional.
Petitioners claim that Taiwan’s current regulations allow the Government to (1) mandatorily collect patients’ sensitive data to establish the Database with no limitation on the retention period, (2) share said data with researchers for academic purposes without informing the data subjects beforehand, (3) blindly allow researchers to use the Database for any academic research, without discerning whether the public interests of said academic research outweighs the data subjects’ rights to privacy, and (4) deny data subjects’ requests to delete their personal data stored in the Database. Petitioners further claim that the risks of illegal collection, processing, and use of such personal data have increased sharply in the digital age, and Taiwan’s current regulations provide insufficient protection of patients’ privacy, and thus violate patients’ information autonomy.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare (“MOHW”), representing the Government’s interest in establishing the Database, points to an article from the Economist, which stated “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data” to support its assertion that, (1) in the era of big data, information is a valuable resource, and Government has the right to fully utilize collected data to promote various public interests, (2) the use of the Database is limited to the purposes of academic research, which may justify said use and which requires no data subject’s consent, (3) safety measures, including encryption, are adopted to protect the Database, and (4) in order that the data in the Database be statistically valid, and to curb the trend of data subjects requesting the deletion of personal information from the Database, no individual’s data is permitted to be deleted from the Database.
The Court will hear oral arguments on 26 April 2022. Pursuant to the Constitutional Court Procedure Act (“Act”), the amicus curiae system (friend of the court) has also been introduced to Taiwan’s legal system, and at least one expert opinion has been submitted to the Court, so far.
This case will be the first clash in the Court arguing the issue of the proper balance between the protection of individual’s privacy in the digital age and the public interest in facilitating big data analysis (in academic research). In the information era, it is foreseeable that conflicts between these two opposing interests will become increasingly more frequent, and the Court’s decision in this case may even shape Taiwan’s national policy related to AI and big data analysis industries in the long term. Experts from various areas are attentively waiting to see how the proceeding on 26 April 2022 plays out, and how the Court will rule on this issue. Formosa Transnational will further update this case in our next report.
