I've done several machine learning projects involving data with HIPAA requirements, and it was a pain in the ass because anything involving talking to a lawyer is a pain in the ass, but "I don't need anything personally identifiable for this project, so all the data I'm working with will be anonymized" was always enough after defining some terms. It's annoying, but not much more annoying than traffic lights and those do more good than harm too.
I believe that in this example, the anonymization was the sticking point. Alexander did not understand (or feigned to not understand) why the data needed to be anonymous and so he throws up sticking points that are almost entirely about making the data anonymous. Had the data been anonymized by an entity capable of separating the hospital from the liability, there probably would have been a lot less drama.
That is where experiments conducted by the doctors get more difficult than experiments conducted by the techies; I'm not collecting any data, I just have to show I'm not taking indecent liberties with the data on servers I have root on. But I think you're getting more directly at the same point I was trying to, that HIPAA shouldn't be that much of an obstacle so long as you're respecting the patients' privacy.Had the data been anonymized by an entity capable of separating the hospital from the liability, there probably would have been a lot less drama.
A big part of the problem is PROVING that you are taking adequate security measures and the needfulness of your study. The people okaying these sorts of things are typically not super savvy in computers or medical science(Even if they are MDs). They are savvy in bureaucracy and administration.HIPAA shouldn't be that much of an obstacle so long as you're respecting the patients' privacy.
I don't think I couldn't, but they were the unsexy "there's tedious work to be done and I can probably write a script that figures out how to do it faster than my users could do it themselves" kind of ML project and I don't have anything interesting to say about them.