Healthcare PHI/PII Compliance Patterns
Patterns for protecting patient data, clinician data, and financial data in healthcare applications. Applicable to HIPAA (US), DISHA (India), GDPR (EU), and general healthcare data protection.
When to Use
- Building any feature that touches patient records
- Implementing access control or authentication for clinical systems
- Designing database schemas for healthcare data
- Building APIs that return patient or clinician data
- Implementing audit trails or logging
- Reviewing code for data exposure vulnerabilities
- Setting up Row-Level Security (RLS) for multi-tenant healthcare systems
How It Works
Healthcare data protection operates on three layers: classification (what is sensitive), access control (who can see it), and audit (who did see it).
Data Classification
PHI (Protected Health Information) — any data that can identify a patient AND relates to their health: patient name, date of birth, address, phone, email, national ID numbers (SSN, Aadhaar, NHS number), medical record numbers, diagnoses, medications, lab results, imaging, insurance policy and claim details, appointment and admission records, or any…
