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Best Practices for Protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Best Practices for Protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

#PII #PHI #HIPAA

Updated over a week ago

ETO Support maintains strict data security protocols to protect your participant data. We are HIPAA and FERPA complaint and continue to audit and improve upon all our security standards. We ask that ETO users follow our data privacy measures to continue to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Although ETO is secure and our Support team is trained in data security measures, we want to ensure the external tools we are using (Email, Chat, Portal, Screenshots, and Attachments) do not contain Personally identifiable information (PII).

To maintain data security we recommend reviewing this information when working with ETO Support:

What is Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?

Any combination of these data points that could identify someone specifically:

  • First name

  • Last name

  • Social Security Number

  • Date of Birth

How do I protect against revealing PII when communicating with Support?

  1. Reference ETO Participants and Entities by their case number.

    1. Use Case Numbers as a searchable field in ETO.

    2. Mask SSN in ETO.

  2. Omit, blur, or remove PII from screenshots.

  3. Check documents before sending them to Support. Any combination of First Name, Last Name, SSN, and DOB should be removed.

    1. You may use encrypted/password-protected files to send PII.

      1. File > Protect Document > enter a password then save the file.

      2. Send the file in one email

      3. Send the password in a follow up email.

What if I accidentally send PII to Support?

Our support team will remove PII from emails, case comments, chats, or other correspondences, then log any reveals of PII internally.

How do I communicate my issue without revealing PII to Support?

A Zoom session will be the best way for support to see your screen without transmitting PII through an email or screenshot.

We will offer a Zoom session and recommend you use case numbers to identify Participants in the future.

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