What is the significance of PHI in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act(HIPAA)?

PHI, or protected health information, is any information that is a part of the record that is potentially considered vital information for a certain patient.

A patient's demographic information in the computer for an appointment at the health department is obviously talking about one patient, so this would be an example of PHI.

A patient's lab report that hasn't been filed yet, while not in the file, it does have the potential to be vital information of the one patient, so it is an example of PHI. A nurse discussing a patient's diagnosis with a physician would be an example of PHI because it will be added to the patient's record.

In order to answer this question well, you should first know what PHI means. PHI stands for Protected Health Information. This is any information that is placed in the record that will be considered vital information for one particular patient.

Out of all the choices mentioned above, only letter C is not specific towards one patient. It talks about the record of HIV cases in one state. All of the other choices talk about information that can be about a particular patient. PHI is important because this helps in diagnosing a person’s current medical condition especially if the doctors are having a hard time figuring out what’s wrong with the patient.