So you know you are regulated by HIPAA. But in a broad sense, what must your organization do to be in compliance? First and foremost, you need to understand what HIPAA and the HITECH Act are regulating. HIPAA and the HITECH Act are regulating and enforcing the security of an individual patient’s health information. The specific information being regulated is known as Protected Health Information (PHI), also known sometimes as Individually Identifiable Health Information (IIHI), and its subset, electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI). ePHI is simply PHI stored, maintained, etc. in digital form. These are defined as any data that can individually identify a patient. That means anything that can reasonably ID a patient. Examples include SSN, medical ID, age, vmail, URLs, driver’s license number, license plate numbers, photos, names of relatives, identified test results, telephone numbers, email and postal addresses, and medical images. As can be seen, this sweeps a large swath of data under the umbrella of protected information.
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