Michigan Medicine Email Metadata

To Whom It May Concern:

This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act. For all email accounts under the management of Michigan Medicine (med.umich.edu), I hereby request copies of the following information for all emails sent and received for a continuous 180-day period from the past two years:

1. From address
2. To address
3. bcc addresses
4. cc addresses
5. Time
6. Date

E-mail metadata is trivially exportable from the IT infrastructure of any modern e-mail archiving or data retention system - such as Microsoft Outlook 365, Google, Datacove, etc. I request that the information I seek be provided in electronic, machine-readable, and non-commercial format (such as CSV), and I would like to receive it on a DVD-ROM, Solid-State Drive, or USB Flash Drive.

Please note that I am not requesting the contents of each email. E-mail metadata does not include the contents of the specified e-mails, thus do not need individual review for redaction.

As the FOIA requires, please release all reasonably segregable nonexempt portions of the data. The fields requested contain no protected health information as described by the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Additionally, metadata is releasable under FOIA (see National Day Laborer Organizing Network v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency).

In order to help to determine my status to assess fees, you should know that I am a graduate student at the University of Michigan Medical School, Department of Learning Health Sciences and this request is made for a scholarly purpose and not for commercial use.

I request a waiver of all fees for this request and if a waiver is not granted, please inform me of the costs before processing my request. Disclosure of the requested information to me is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government and is not primarily in my commercial interest. Specifically, the data will be used in an analysis of the communication structure of a health system and will be compared to formal organizational charts. In addition to generalizable knowledge related to appropriate structural characteristics of Learning Health Systems, which is the topic of my dissertation, I will make all results, including a network structure map, publicly available. Additionally, FOIA could prove to be immeasurably useful tool for public Learning Health Systems because it allows a unique opportunity for researchers to learn how health systems work. Although I cannot estimate the amount of work that this request will require, I do recognize that it could be significant.

I have included my email address and telephone number below. I can be contacted by telephone between the hours of 8am to 5pm, if necessary, to discuss any aspect of my request.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 10 days.

Sincerely,

Elliott Brannon, MPH
MD/PhD Fellow
University of Michigan Medical School
Department of Learning Health Sciences
ebrann@umich.edu
773.580.4833