Protected Health Information (PHI)

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Protected Health Information (PHI) refers to individually identifiable medical and insurance records plus associated hospital and laboratory test results governed under HIPAA.

• includes information about past, present, or future health, as well as related payments and data used in the operation of a healthcare business
• may be associated with a specific person or used as an anonymized or de-identified data set for analysis and research
  • de-identified data set contains codes that allow the subject information to be reconstructed by the data provider
• highly sensitive
• reputational damage caused by a healthcare data breach is huge
• governed under HIPAA

Electronic PHI (ePHI) is any PHI stored or transmitted electronically.