1 Scope
This Technical Specification defines a set of high-level categories of purposes for
which personal health information can be processed, i.e. collected, used, stored, accessed, analysed, created, linked, communicated, disclosed or retained.
This is in order to provide a framework for classifying the various specific purposes
that can be defined and used by individual policy domains (e.g. healthcare organizations, regional health authorities, jurisdictions,
countries) as an aid to the consistent management of information in the delivery of
health care services and for the communication of electronic health records across
organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.
The scope of application of this Technical Specification is limited to Personal Health
Information (PHI) as defined in ISO 27799, information about an identifiable person
that relates to the physical or mental health of the individual, or to provision of
health services to the individual. This information might include:
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— information about the registration of the individual for the provision of health services;
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— information about payments or eligibility for heath care in respect to the individual;
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— a number, symbol or particular code assigned to an individual to uniquely identify the individual for health purposes;
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— any information about the individual that is collected in the course of the provision of health services to the individual;
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— information derived from the testing or examination of a body part or bodily substance;
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— identification of a person, e.g. a health professional, as a provider of healthcare to the individual.
This Technical Specification, while not defining an exhaustive set of such purposes,
provides a common mapping target to bridge between differing national lists, thereby
supporting authorized automated cross- border flows of EHR data.
This Technical Specification is not intended to control the use of non-personal health
information. However, because anonymization or de-identification of data might be
a condition of further use or new uses, a defined data purpose might be a requirement
for the use of even de-identified or anonymized data according to the policy or law of a given jurisdiction.
Health data that have been irreversibly de-identified are not formally in the scope
of this Technical Specification. Since de-identification processes often include some
degree of reversibility, however, this Technical Specification can also be used for
disclosures of de-identified health data whenever practicable.