Information for Faculty & Staff
FERPA for Faculty, Staff, & Administrators
FERPA stands for Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, as Amended. It is commonly known as FERPA, the Privacy Act or the Buckley Amendment. It is a federal law designed to protect the privacy of educational records, to establish the right of students to inspect and review their educational records, and to provide guidelines for the correction of inaccurate and misleading data through informal and formal hearings.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
For those who would like a quick understanding about the requirements for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, here is a 15 minute presentation. This may be useful in helping you understand HIPAA and the requirements around it.
Faculty and staff who access, use, or transfer within treatment, payment, or health care operations at TAMU will need to take the following course within TrainTraq. This course will be required every two years. New faculty and staff must take this training within 30 days of hire.
Business Associate Agreement (BAA) Guidance
If you are a covered entity and you would be sharing personal health information (PHI) with a third party, one of the options that will allow you to do this is a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Below is the link to the most recent BAA template. This template is watermarked. You may review this template to verify that you have the most recent BAA version. As always, please validate with the Privacy Officer whether a BAA is needed. The Privacy Officer can then approve moving forward.
https://privacy.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/BAA-Template-TAMU-as-BAA_Sept2020.pdf
If we as an entity are being asked to sign a BAA from an external covered entity, below is a template of a BAA that we would initially propose. This template is watermarked and only meant to be used when we are asked to be the Business Associate. Please contact the Privacy Officer to validate that this is the appropriate mechanism. It will have to be approved by the Privacy Officer in order to proceed.
https://privacy.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/BAA-Template-TAMU-as-Covered-Entity_Sept2020.pdf