SurveyGizmo meets HIPAA and Safe Harbor Guidlines
SurveyGizmo is happy to announce that we now have HIPAA and Safe Harbor certifications. These are two forms of personal information protection. HIPAA is a US law regarding health information and Safe Harbor is US Department of Commerce program to help business comply with EU privacy laws. Some of you might find it interesting that most of our competitors offering online surveys do not have HIPAA certification and a few don’t have Safe Harbor either, so we’re happy to help.
Safe Harbor
In 1998, The European Union Commission’s Directive on Data Protection went into effect and basically created a set of stringent privacy guidelines for the protection of personal data. It also prohibited the transfer of personal data to non-European Union nations that do not follow those guidelines. In other words our EU friends might not be able to use SurveyGizmo to get their burning questions answered. In steps Safe Harbor registration which bridges the gap between US and EU privacy laws. By meeting the Safe Harbor guidelines we can all get along. The really good news is that SurveyGizmo already met or exceeded these privacy guidelines, but now we have gone through the process to be able to say so.
HIPAA
HIPAA or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is a US federal law that establishes standards for the privacy and security of health information. Once again SurveyGizmo already abided by the spirit of these protections, but is now all read up, quizzed up, and self-certified in both the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the Security Rule provisions. This means that we meet the guidelines from privacy perspective (we don’t share your data - nuff said) and a security perspective (we protected it and keep it private).
We fall under what is known as a “Business Associate” meaning that we are not the actual entity collecting the PHI (Protected Health Information — in HIPAA-speak), but service the organizations that do so. We used the free and truly wonderful resource from the University of Miami School of Medicine The Privacy / Data Protection Project. It’s full of tons of useful documentation, but they must believe like we do that there is no reason you can’t have some fun while doing some serious learning.