Describes a set of high-level categories of purposes for which personal health information can be processed, i.e. collected, used, stored, accessed, analysed, created, linked, communicated, disclosed or retained.

This Technical Specification defines a set of high-level categories of purposes for which personal health information can be processed, i.e. collected, used, stored, accessed, analysed, created, linked, communicated, disclosed or retained. This is in order to provide a framework for classifying the various specific purposes that can be defined and used by individual policy domains (e.g. healthcare organizations, regional health authorities, jurisdictions, countries) as an aid to the consistent management of information in the delivery of health care services and for the communication of electronic health records across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.

The scope of application of this Technical Specification is limited to Personal Health Information (PHI) as defined in ISO 27799, information about an identifiable person that relates to the physical or mental health of the individual, or to provision of health services to the individual. This information might include:

• information about the registration of the individual for the provision of health services;

• information about payments or eligibility for heath care in respect to the individual;

• a number, symbol or particular code assigned to an individual to uniquely identify the individual for health purposes;

• any information about the individual that is collected in the course of the provision of health services to the individual;

• information derived from the testing or examination of a body part or bodily substance;

• identification of a person, e.g. a health professional, as a provider of healthcare to the individual.

This Technical Specification, while not defining an exhaustive set of such purposes, provides a common mapping target to bridge between differing national lists, thereby supporting authorized automated cross-border flows of EHR data.

This Technical Specification is not intended to control the use of non-personal health information. However, because anonymization or de-identification of data might be a condition of further use or new uses, a defined data purpose might be a requirement for the use of even de-identified or anonymized data according to the policy or law of a given jurisdiction.

Health data that have been irreversibly de-identified are not formally in the scope of this Technical Specification. Since de-identification processes often include some degree of reversibility, however, this Technical Specification can also be used for disclosures of de-identified health data whenever practicable.