Using LaunchDarkly with Protected Health Information (PHI)

This guide explains what to consider when you need to send Protected Health Information (PHI) to LaunchDarkly, and how to enable HIPAA compliance for your LaunchDarkly account. By following these recommendations, you can support your organization’s requirements for HIPAA compliance. Before LaunchDarkly can support your HIPAA compliance, you must review and implement the guidelines in this topic. When you pass user data through LaunchDarkly, consider whether the customers affected are protected by laws that restrict which data you can transmit or LaunchDarkly can view. Depending on the requirements of your organization, you may want to limit or completely restrict the data you send to LaunchDarkly. To learn more about limiting the data you pass through LaunchDarkly, you can read Minimizing LaunchDarkly’s access to user data.

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Prerequisites

In order to enable secure PHI transmission in LaunchDarkly, you must have the following prerequisites:

• An existing LaunchDarkly account
• A Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with LaunchDarkly. To start the BAA process, contact your LaunchDarkly Account Executive.

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HIPAA requirements

The HIPAA privacy law dictates policies to protect all individually identifiable health information that is held or transmitted. When a provider or service uses personally identifiable information (PII) in conjunction with information about an individual’s physical or mental health or condition, health care, or payment for that health care, it becomes Protected Health Information (PHI). To learn more about what types of information make PHI, read The 18 HIPAA Identifiers. LaunchDarkly supports HIPAA compliant operations, but we require additional agreements from existing customers to ensure it.

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Send PHI to LaunchDarkly

After you enter into a BAA with LaunchDarkly, you can pass PHI through some fields in your LaunchDarkly account. When a BAA is in place, LaunchDarkly will handle data in specific fields differently based on the assumption that those fields may contain PHI. Only send LaunchDarkly PHI in the following fields:

• Context objects
• Flag targeting rules

Do not send LaunchDarkly PHI in any other field. There is no way for LaunchDarkly to determine if information in text fields is PHI, and there are no safeguards in place to prevent you from transmitting PHI in other fields.