Note: Your progress in watching these videos WILL NOT be tracked. These training videos are the same videos you will experience when you take the full ProHIPAA program. You may begin the training for free at any time to start officially tracking your progress toward your certificate of completion.
Welcome to your HIPAA compliance training course at ProHIPAA. This course is for anyone who needs a greater understanding of the importance of safeguarding Protected Health Information (PHI) and the ways in which you can do that, whether you're a trusted medical professional or a business associate who supports a medical professional or healthcare organization.
In this course, you'll learn:
This course also includes sections on:
Keep these in mind as you proceed through this course, as well as a few important course objectives:
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Since safeguarding PHI is the entire reason for HIPAA's existence, let's take a closer look at what constitutes Protected Health Information.
PHI is that health information that can identify an individual to whom the information belongs to. HIPAA's Privacy Rule was established to help protect PHI while in the care of either covered entities or business associates. This includes whether a covered entity or business associate is sending, receiving, or storing this information.
A covered entity is:
The most common examples of a covered entity are your doctor's office and your dentist's office.
HHS.gov defines a business associate as, “A person or entity (other than a member of the covered entity's workforce) that performs certain functions or activities on behalf of, or provides certain services to, a covered entity that involve the use or disclosure of protected health information.”
A common example of a business associate would be a third-party billing service that handles payment transactions on behalf of your doctor's or dentist's office.
The two key elements to whether or not a piece of information can be considered PHI are:
Common pieces of information that are identifiable are names, addresses, dates of birth, and social security numbers. Everything an identity thief needs.
There are actually 18 HIPAA identifiers, which will be listed at the end of this section.
Protected Health Information can include:
PHI can be found in three forms:
Remember that for information to be considered PHI, it must be identifiable. Here are 18 identifiers as outlined in the Privacy Rule.