What is considered unsecured PHI?

Unsecured Protected Health Information (PHI) refers to any health information that is not adequately protected against unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. The correct answer highlights that PHI without any protective measures is considered unsecured because it is vulnerable to breaches and unauthorized access.

For instance, if PHI is simply stored in a plain text file without any encryption, password protection, or other safeguards, it is easily accessible to anyone who might gain access to it. This lack of security measures makes it unsecured, as required by health information privacy regulations.

In contrast, PHI that is encrypted, is unintelligible to unauthorized persons, or is stored securely has protective mechanisms in place that render it secure. Encryption scrambles data, making it unreadable to those without the appropriate decryption key, while unintelligibility implies that the data cannot be understood without certain authorization. Therefore, those options do not meet the criteria for unsecured PHI.