HIPAA

[Guest jgf810]

If a company shares individual employee health plan selection and cost data with their managers for budgeting purposes. Would this be viewed as sharing PHI as an "employer function" and not require HIPAA privacy training for all managers that have budgeting responsibilities.

[KIP KRAUS]

I’m not sure what individual health plan selection and cost data you are talking about. Why would it be necessary to let managers know an individual’s health plan selection? It would seem to me that a summary of the selections by plan without identifying individuals would suffice, i.e., 2 employees in with single HMO coverage; 5 employees with family Comprehensive coverage, and the costs associated with each.

This type of information would not be considered PHI.

[Sandra Pearce]

An additional thought might be that when budgeting for a future year you really should be using one figure for the benefits of each potential employee. Employees are terminated and hired and they change their benefit elections. Our company has the department heads use a figure for the cost of health benefits which is pre-determined using data (not PHI data) from the health plan. The dollar figure is used for all employees.