FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) differ in terms in the type of data they aim to protect and this can produce some confusion, i.e. concerning the software program of HIPAA Privacy Rule regulations for educational bodies that adhere to FERPA standards. Even though HIPAA aims to protect a patient’s information, FERPA is limited to protecting only a student’s health information.

When HIPAA is Applicable to Schools
However, a school does act as a healthcare provider when it provides healthcare services to its students. Here, if the school requirements to conduct any transactions from the electronic mode, it functions similar for the activities performed by the covered entities as described in HIPAA’s Privacy Rule standards. Hence, the school is then covered under HIPAA regulations. In this kind of cases, the school need to ensure that it’s compatible with the HIPAA Administrative Simplification Rules for Transactions and Code Sets and Identifiers. These HIPAA standards are aimed at maintaining the integrity of healthcare-related transactions.

When HIPAA just isn’t Applicable to Schools
Understandably, this can be not applicable to all schools. For instance, if the records maintained by the school are simply “education records” (also referred to as “treatment records”), they ought to be compatible with FERPA and not the HIPAA Privacy Rule standards. Thus, such schools aren’t needed to comply with HIPAA Privacy Rule since they’re maintaining “education records” (as defined by FERPA) and not PHI or Protected Health Facts (as defined by HIPAA).

Some Exceptions
Among post-secondary institutions, a slight variation comes to the interpretation of FERPA’s “education records”. Here, the psychological treatment as well as other medical records of students aren’t covered as a part of “education records”, i.e. if these kinds of records are shared for your sole function of treating the student, i.e. as soon as disclosing such records is central to providing the appropriate treatment.

Such exceptions to FERPA are also applicable to HIPAA Privacy Rule as well as the HIPAA Security Rule. This is due to the fact Security Rule regulations apply to all the subsets of data included inside Privacy Rule (i.e. related to electronic type of PHI).

Boone Gomez administers edocscan.com. For more information on emr software and ferpa regulations , visit http://www.edocsan.com