What administrative safeguards should be implemented to protect the collected data while in use by Manasa and her product management team?

SCENARIO

Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:

Manasa is a product manager at Omnipresent Omnimedia, where she is responsible for leading the development of the company’s flagship product, the Handy Helper. The Handy Helper is an application that can be used in the home to manage family calendars, do online shopping, and schedule doctor appointments. After having had a successful launch in the United States, the Handy Helper is about to be made available for purchase worldwide.

The packaging and user guide for the Handy Helper indicate that it is a "privacy friendly" product suitable for the whole family, including children, but does not provide any further detail or privacy notice. In order to use the application, a family creates a single account, and the primary user has access to all information about the other users. Upon start up, the primary user must check a box consenting to receive marketing emails from Omnipresent Omnimedia and selected marketing partners in order to be able to use the application.

Sanjay, the head of privacy at Omnipresent Omnimedia, was working on an agreement with a European distributor of Handy Helper when he fielded many Questions about the product from the distributor. Sanjay needed to look more closely at the product in order to be able to answer the Questions as he was not involved in the product development process.

In speaking with the product team, he learned that the Handy Helper collected and stored all of a user’s sensitive medical information for the medical appointment scheduler. In fact, all of the user’s information is stored by Handy Helper for the additional purpose of creating additional products and to analyze usage of the product. This data is all stored in the cloud and is encrypted both during transmission and at rest.

Consistent with the CEO’s philosophy that great new product ideas can come from anyone, all Omnipresent Omnimedia employees have access to user data under a program called Eureka. Omnipresent Omnimedia is hoping that at some point in the future, the data will reveal insights that could be used to create a fully automated application that runs on artificial intelligence, but as of yet, Eureka is not well-defined and is considered a long-term goal.

What administrative safeguards should be implemented to protect the collected data while in use by Manasa and her product management team?
A . Document the data flows for the collected data.
B . Conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) to evaluate the risks involved.
C . Implement a policy restricting data access on a "need to know" basis.
D . Limit data transfers to the US by keeping data collected in Europe within a local data center.

View Answer

Answer: C

Explanation:

An administrative safeguard that should be implemented to protect the collected data while in use by Manasa and her product management team is a policy restricting data access on a “need to know” basis. This means that only authorized personnel who have a legitimate business purpose for accessing the data should be able to do so3 This would help to prevent unauthorized or unnecessary access, use, or disclosure of sensitive or personal data by internal or external parties. It would also reduce the risk of data breaches, theft, or loss that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data4

Reference: 3: HIPAA Security Series #2 – Administrative Safeguards – HHS.gov; 4: Administrative Safeguards of the Security Rule: What Are They?