What Do You Mean By Individually Identifiable Health Information?

What is mean by the individually identifiable health information? What are the institutes that should follow the rules and regulations and what are the reasons on the basis of which the companies can share and transfer the personal information of the patients?

What do you mean by individually identifiable health information?

In order to answer the question about “individually identifiable health information”, it is important that the people should define the health information. According to the HIPAA, the health information is the information that is received or created by any of the entity registered by HIPAA. The HIPAA entities include all the organizations that are registered by HIPAA and follow their rules and regulations. These entities include the health plan, the healthcare provider, and many others.

The health information of any patient includes the past, future and the present information of the physical and mental condition of the patients, personal information, financial information and the information related to the insurance. In some cases, the health information also includes the demographics of the patients. The individually identifiable health information is considered as the subset of the health information. As the name of the information shows, the individually identifiable health information is all about a specific person.

HIPAA applies its rules to all the users of the individually identifiable health information while the health information is not about any specific person so the rules are not restricted to health information.

If any of the entity under the HIPAA has t share or pass on the individually identifiable health information to other party then it is important that information should be de-identified according to the HIPAA rules. In order to de-identify the rules, the entity should remove 18 identifiers from the data. These identifiers are as under:

1. The names of the patients including the first and the last names
2. The geographical identification
3. The data related to a specific individual
4. Fax number
5. Phone number
6. SSN
7. Email address
8. Medical record and its number
9. Health Insurance
10. Certificate number
11. Account number
12. Vehicle Number
13. Device number
14. IP address
15. URLS
16. Biometric information
17. Photographic image
18. Identifying number