OPM Advances Health Data Collection Plan Despite Privacy Concerns
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) pushed ahead with plans to collect the health data of federal workers, retirees, and their family members with some changes. According to a notice in the Federal Register, the new record keeping system for health care benefits fully took effect on July 24, 2026, allowing OPM to collect the data any time after that.
The updated notice makes several changes to OPM's original proposal to collect health insurance claims and administrative records, which the agency says is needed to better identify waste and fraud in the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) and Postal Service Health Benefits (PSHB) programs.
OPM’s changes include adding the records of PSHB enrollees and adding in new detailed data fields for items like prescription codes, provider-charge and payer information, and dates of service. OPM also now plans to obtain Medicare claims data for federal employees, retirees, and family members enrolled in both Medicare and FEHB or PSHB.
“Pseudonymized Data”
The original proposal sparked criticism from privacy advocates, insurers, and Democrats who demanded the program be pulled over fears that too much personal health data would be collected.
In response to those concerns, OPM says the identities of enrollees will be “pseudonymized.” Names, addresses, and Social Security numbers will be removed, but birth years will be retained. Agency technical staff will receive member identification numbers that are scrambled before the data are provided to other agency personnel.
However, the notice also states that OPM retains the ability to re-identify records for "authorized operational purposes."
The notice requires 65 health insurers to routinely send OPM detailed data.
Meanwhile, some federal labor groups say the safeguards still do not adequately protect enrollee privacy.
For example, in a comment letter, National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE) President William Shackelford said that while OPM has resolved some of the organization’s concerns, the move to pseudonymize data does not do enough.
“Pseudonymization does not remove the risk that our members' health information will be linked back to them; it makes that linkage a matter of OPM's discretion, exercisable by whoever holds the relevant authority in any future administration,” wrote Shackelford.
Fighting Fraud
OPM says the additional information is critical to detecting waste and fraud in the FEHB and PSHB programs.
OPM General Counsel Kurt Dykstra told KFF News that the information could demonstrate “potential anomalies in usage patterns that could be related to the individual, but really also could be related to the provider, the treater, the clinic — whoever it is that’s actually providing the care.”
