Introduction to the Fundamentals of Law for Health Information and Information Management Practice Test

Understanding what counts as Protected Health Information (PHI) under HIPAA helps you spot what must be protected. PHI is any information about a person’s health status, the care they receive, or the payment for that care, if that information can identify the individual. In a medical record, a patient’s diagnosis is health information that is linked to that identifiable person, so it is PHI.

The other options don’t fit PHI as described: a hospital budget is financial information about the organization, not health information tied to an individual; a de-identified dataset has had identifiers removed and therefore cannot identify the person, so it’s not PHI; a list of non-health-related phone numbers contains no health information about an individual.