What Healthcare Organizations Need to Know About HIPAA, Minors and Privacy

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The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has some specific requirements related to handling the protected health information (PHI) for minors and for the types of access that can be allowed to this information, even to parents and guardians. Many state-level laws also have requirements for restricting parental and guardian access to minors’ PHI under certain conditions.

With the commonplace practice of allowing individuals access to their account information via Internet applications, particularly among health insurance companies and pharmacies, it is important that covered entities consider the issues and impacts of providing access to the PHI of minors through such automated means as well as in person.

Restricting access to minors' PHI from parents certainly can be tricky, particularly within automated systems that may not have access controls down to the field level. I just posted a paper, "What Healthcare Organizations Need to Know About HIPAA, Minors and Privacy," on my Realtime-IT Compliance site that provides information about the issues organizations, such as healthcare insurers, healthcare providers and pharmacies, need to address when establishing ways to restrict access to minors' PHI.

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

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