ActionURL targets override for Privacy and Terms of Use from HealthVault Application Configuration Center

As mentioned in Chris Tremonte’s blog on ActionUrl, Privacy and Terms of Use, HealthVault Application Configuration Center now supports hardcoded statements for both Privacy and Terms of Use irrespective of the ActionURL specified for the application. The only way previously supported was to show relevant Privacy and Terms of Use to the user is by deriving it from the ActionURL. You can find the appropriate Application Targets in the HealthVault Shell Redirect Interfaces. With the released feature, you can now use HealthVault Application Configuration Center to achieve the same results by specifying the contents for the Privacy Statement and the Terms of Use in the Information Tab. 

           Figure 1: Information Tab in HealthVault Application Configuration Center 

If an ActionURL is not specified for SODA and PatientConnect applications, then both Privacy and Terms of Use statements in the Application Configuration Center must be specified. Suppose you have implemented both ActionURL targets for Privacy/Terms of Use and statements in the Application Configuration Center than the hardcoded statements from the Application Configuration Center will override the derived ActionURL targets.

Table 1: Summary of TOU and Privacy statements use for different types of applications

Note: If the organization is covered under the HIPAA or Clinical Trial, then it is not required for the application to derive the privacy page. 

Privacy and Terms of Use statements in the Application Configuration Center are useful for web applications when the ActionURL is behind a firewall. This allows for HealthVault to serve up the Privacy and Terms of Use statements to users directly without requiring an ActionURL to redirect the user to the Privacy or Terms of Use statements. Also note that the Application Configuration Center now accepts only plain text for the Privacy or the Terms of Use statements, which still allows you to use the ActionURL if you are using HTML in either of your statements.