European Privacy Law Raising Costs for U.S. Health Care

The U.S. pharmaceutical and medical device industries are scrambling to figure out if they need to comply with a newly minted European privacy regulation that could raise compliance costs sky high.

Individual Fortune 500 companies, which include U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers, can expect to spend $1 million setting up a process to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, according to a survey from Paul Hastings, an international law firm based in Los Angeles. Compliance measures can include hiring new staff focused on privacy and setting up processes to speed up the reporting on data breaches.

The GDPR, which took effect ...