International Organization for Standardization

Health informatics — Classification of purposes for processing personal health information - First Edition
 N TS 14265

Annotation

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:

— information about the registration of the individual for the provision of health services;

— information about payments or eligibility for heath care in respect to the individual;

— a number, symbol or particular code assigned to an individual to uniquely identify the individual for health purposes;

— any information about the individual that is collected in the course of the provision of health services to the individual;

— information derived from the testing or examination of a body part or bodily substance;