HIPAA and Protected Health Information

Billshrinkers provides medical billing services for mental and behavioral health practices. When we bill on your behalf, we handle protected health information (PHI), so under HIPAA we act as your business associate. This page explains, in plain terms, how we approach that responsibility.

Business Associate Agreements

Before we handle any protected health information for a practice, we enter into a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). The BAA sets out how we may use and disclose PHI on your behalf and holds us to the obligations HIPAA places on business associates.

How we use and disclose PHI

We use and disclose protected health information only as your Business Associate Agreement and HIPAA permit, and only to carry out the billing work you have asked us to do. We follow the minimum necessary principle, meaning we work with the least information required to complete a task.

How we safeguard information

As a business associate, we are directly subject to the HIPAA Security Rule. We maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards intended to protect the electronic protected health information in our care and to limit access to the people who need it for their work.

Subcontractors

If we use a subcontractor whose work involves protected health information, we require that subcontractor to agree to the same protections we are held to.

If a breach occurs

If a breach of unsecured protected health information affects a practice we serve, we will notify that practice in keeping with HIPAA’s breach notification requirements so the practice can meet its own obligations.

This website

Please do not send protected health information through this website. Do not submit patient names, dates of birth, insurance ID numbers, diagnoses, claim details, or any other identifying patient information. How we handle the information collected through this site is described in our Privacy Policy.

Questions

If you have a question about how we handle protected health information, call us at the number below. Please do not include patient information when you contact us.