  Capabilities to exchange health information are critical to accelerate
discovery and its diffusion to healthcare practice. However, the same ethical
and legal policies that protect privacy hinder these data exchanges, and the
issues accumulate if moving data across geographical or organizational borders.
This can be seen as one of the reasons why many health technologies and
research findings are limited to very narrow domains. In this paper, we compare
how using and disclosing personal data for research purposes is addressed in
Australian, Austrian, Finnish, Swiss, and US policies with a focus on text data
analytics. Our goal is to identify approaches and issues that enable or hinder
international health information exchanges. As expected, the policies within
each country are not as diverse as across countries. Most policies apply the
principles of accountability and/or adequacy and are thereby fundamentally
similar. Their following requirements create complications with re-using and
re-disclosing data and even secondary data: 1) informing data subjects about
the purposes of data collection and use, before the dataset is collected; 2)
assurance that the subjects are no longer identifiable; and 3) destruction of
data when the research activities are finished. Using storage and compute cloud
services as well as other exchange technologies on the Internet without proper
permissions is technically not allowed if the data are stored in another
country. Both legislation and technologies are available as vehicles for
overcoming these barriers. The resulting richness in information variety will
contribute to the development and evaluation of new clinical hypotheses and
technologies.
