Which HIPAA methods are used for the legal deidentification of protected health information?

The correct answer is expert determination and safe harbor, which are the two recognized methods for legally deidentifying protected health information (PHI) under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

The expert determination method involves a qualified statistician or expert who evaluates the PHI to ensure that the risk of identifying an individual from the data is sufficiently low. This process requires a formal assessment of the data, allowing the expert to determine how much information can be safely omitted or altered.

Safe harbor, on the other hand, provides specific guidelines that specify which identifiers must be removed to achieve deidentification. This includes stripping away items like names, geographical subdivisions smaller than a state, any dates related to the individual, and other direct identifiers. If all the guidelines in the safe harbor method are followed, the information is considered deidentified under HIPAA regulations.

The other methods listed, such as encryption and tokenization, primarily serve to protect data confidentiality and security rather than fulfilling the criteria for legal deidentification set forth by HIPAA. Data masking and anonymization also relate to data protection but do not align with HIPAA's specific deidentification standards. Privacy shields and consent forms are frameworks for data sharing and privilege, not methods of de