What do you mean by the Protected Health Information (PHI)?

HIPAA announced all the companies to cover the security of the PHI of the patients including their integrity, availability and the confidentiality. Before that, they need to explain that what is mean by the protected health information? It is associated with the business entities. Here the business entities are the health plans, the healthcare providers and the clearing houses that transfer the health data of the customers electronically to get its advantage. Usually a business associate is a person or an organization that perform the activities on the behalf of the company HIPAA that has access to PHI of the patients.

What do you mean by the term PHI (Protected Health Information)?

PHI is the abbreviation of protected health information that contains the data all about the health entities as it includes the creation, receiving and the storing of the health care information of the patients, the payments and the healthcare operations. The PHI of the patients include the demographics of the patients, test results, the medical history, the information about the insurance and some other related information.

All this information is related to the past, present and the future health conditions of the patient and the payments associated with those conditions. The term “protected” means that the information is fully protected under the rights and rules of the HIPAA organization. The PHI includes the code and this code is applied to all the health records, but this code is not implemented to the education record or the employee record. If the patient is also the employee, then HIPAA record includes the code of the healthcare conditions of the patient rather than the employee code.

What do you mean by the Individually Identifiable Health Information?

When the information of any patient is used by the HIPAA or the related institutes for the services or the payment setting then it is known as the Protected Health information. In total there are almost 18 identifier that can be used to contact, identify and locate the people. If the information contains any of these identifier then it is known as the PHI.

1. The name of the patient
2. Geographical information of the patient
3. Dates of Birth
4. Fax number
5. Phone number
6. Email information
7. SSN
8. Medical Record number
9. Health insurance information
10. Account number
11. License number
12. Vehicle information
13. Serial number
14. IP address
15. Biometric information
16. Photographs
17. Web URLs
18. Identification number