How much do you want to share about your current sports activities?  Are you comfortable in sharing if you have a chronic illness with others?  Of course, this information is necessary when compiling a PHR but what about our privacy and security?  HIPAA protects our personal health information but there are other types of information that the Red Flags Rule will help to protect such as social security number, credit card information and insurance information.  Also, compliance with the Red Flags rule will be out August 1 and it is there to PREVENT another individual from taking your personal information and using it as their own to obtain medical treatment.  It works in a similar fashion when there may be potential fraudulent activity on your credit card.  When this occurs, you are notified and asked if the activity is related to your own transactions.  The Red Flags Rule will work in a similar fashion and enables the patient to be alerted when there may be suspicious activity related to medical treatment.  This type of alert can help in preventing medical identity theft BEFORE it occurs so that we are preventing the activity rather than having to react to it.  The Red Flags Rule requires that agencies have policies and procedures in place so that they can better find, react and respond to possible medical identity theft. 

Having both HIPAA and the Red Flags Rule in place provides a little less anxiousness on the part of the athlete when building parts of our PHR.  It will also make the information that we provide more accurate and usable in cases of emergency. 
 
For more information on the Red Flags Rule, please visit the AMA website:  http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/368/red-flags-rule-edu.pdf

Tags   health information, privacy, hipaa, athletes, red flag rule