HIPAA compliant email postscript
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Many US healthcare professionals add postscripts to their email signature lines to encourage the security of protected health information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Such postscripts are relatively new and as a practical matter may be restricted in length by the length of the signature field in various email clients, commonly about 1000 characters. The technical standards of HIPAA's security rule require the use of encryption, such as PGP, for electronic communication of protected health information over open networks. An example of a postscript that aims to be HIPAA compliant is below. This starts with the sender's contact information:
First Name Last Name
Organization
example@example.com
w xxx.xxx.xxxx
p xxx.xxx.xxxx
c xxx.xxx.xxxx
http://example.com
This message may contain private information for persons named above. Please don't share that information with anyone without a need to know. If you received confidential information without a PGP wrapper, assume it was compromised, delete it, tell the sender, and try to tell the victim. Please don't send someone else's private information if you're not reasonably certain the recipient has a need to know and that the message will be kept private. Plain email is not private. In some cases, such as health information protected under the US HIPAA law or information protected under the US Privacy Act, plain email may be illegal. If you must relate a person's identity to their private information in email, use Hushmail or insist your recipients provide you their PGP public key. You can get my public key from the keyservers or my webpage.