Health record privacy is the paramount concern of the ePACE Health program. Two different steps have been taken by the ePACE Health program to ensure that your medical records are kept private and secure. ePACE Health uses encrypted secure messaging to communicate via email and follows the federal government's HIPAA guidelines in order to provide you with the highest level of privacy, security and confidentiality.

Secure messaging works a lot like email and can be used to communicate online. The difference from email is that secure messaging is secure, private and encrypted. This means that the actual message doesn't "live" in your email file to be discovered by your family or employer. You access it directly from the ePACE website, and can do so from any computer, even when you are away from home.

Your communication with ePACE Health is too important and private to risk on standard email. You will, however, receive notifications in your regular email account when you have received a secure message from ePACE Health. The message will contain a link that allows you to directly access your secure message so you will not have to check more than one email account to find all of your messages.

HIPAA is a federal rule that establishes a baseline for health privacy in the United States. The HIPAA acronym stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Under the authority of that Act, the Federal Department of Health and Human Services issued a health privacy rule and a security rule. These rules establish minimum privacy and security standards for covered entities. A covered entity is a health care provider, health insurer, or administrative clearinghouse. The ePACE program will embrace the HIPAA privacy rules.