Your Practice, Their Data

Privacy essentials for US-based IBCLCs, covering email, texting, social media, clinical tools, secure messaging, and AI.

Your Practice, Their Data provides IBCLCs with the foundational knowledge and practical tools to understand, assess, and address privacy risks across every dimension of private practice: legal, technical, ethical, and relational.

The families we work with hand us intimate information at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. What we do with that information is part of the care we provide.

This course is US-specific. It is designed for IBCLCs in private practice who have basic familiarity with HIPAA but want a comprehensive, current, and clinically grounded framework for privacy practice.

Meet the Instructor

Annie Frisbie is the founder of Paperless Lactation and City Lactation, based in New York City. She has been a board-certified lactation consultant since 2011, providing home visit and virtual lactation support to families across New York City and nationally. She is also a Perinatal Mental Health Certified (PMH-C) clinician through Postpartum Support International.

As founder of Paperless Lactation, Annie has developed continuing education courses, conference presentations, and practice resources for IBCLCs in private practice since 2016. She speaks regularly at national and regional lactation conferences.

Patrick Jones - Course author

Abstract

Privacy in lactation private practice is not a compliance checklist. It is a clinical obligation, an ethical commitment, and — in the post-Dobbs landscape — an urgent responsibility that has changed significantly in the last three years. This course provides lactation consultants with the foundational knowledge and practical tools to understand, assess, and address privacy risks across every dimension of private practice: legal, technical, ethical, and relational.

The course opens with the philosophical foundation of privacy as information self-determination, grounded in the landmark Warren and Brandeis framework and updated for the current data economy. It moves through the US legal landscape — HIPAA, the 2024 Reproductive Health Privacy Final Rule, and key state privacy laws — into practical risk assessment of the communication channels, technology stack, and digital presence that characterize modern lactation practice. Dedicated modules on AI documentation tools and social media complete the framework, with particular attention to the consent obligations and professional conduct questions lactation consultants are most likely to face but least likely to have been prepared for.

What distinguishes this course from standard HIPAA training is its dual framing: privacy as both a regulatory compliance matter and an ethical practice standard that rises above the legal minimum. The families we serve share intimate health information at the most vulnerable moments of their lives. This course argues — and demonstrates — that the thoughtfulness with which we hold that information is part of the care we provide.

This course is US-specific. It is designed for lactation consultants in private practice who have basic familiarity with HIPAA but want a comprehensive, current, and clinically grounded framework for privacy practice.

Knowledge Gap

Privacy and security training for healthcare providers tends to fall into two failure modes: overly technical compliance content that practitioners cannot translate into daily decisions, or content so superficial that it does not reflect the actual risk landscape. The result is a common pattern: IBCLCs know they need to take HIPAA seriously, have completed a basic training, and still have significant gaps — in their technology stack, their communication practices, their consent procedures, and their understanding of the legal developments that have changed the picture since 2022.

The 2024 Reproductive Health Privacy Final Rule is unknown to many practitioners. The end of the COVID-19 telehealth HIPAA enforcement discretion — which changed what video platforms are permissible for clinical use — is not reflected in the actual practices of many IBCLCs. The privacy implications of AI ambient documentation tools are not addressed in any existing lactation-specific continuing education. The distinction between the blanket consent language in a typical intake form and the specific, documented consent that ethical use of client images requires is not addressed in clinical training. And the data practices of the baby tracking apps that IBCLCs routinely recommend to families — without any privacy context — represent an invisible risk that families deserve to understand.

This course addresses all of those gaps in a single, unified framework that treats privacy not as a separate administrative concern but as an integral part of ethical, client-centered lactation private practice. It also addresses a specific population-level concern: the differential data privacy risk faced by lactation clients from marginalized communities, whose information is more likely to be used in ways that cause harm and who have the most at stake in how private practice data systems are structured.

Objectives

01

Define privacy as a concept of information self-determination and explain its ethical and legal foundations in United States healthcare contexts, including the Warren and Brandeis framework and the principle of contextual integrity.

02

Identify the primary mechanisms of surveillance capitalism, including data broker infrastructure and behavioral data monetization, and describe how these mechanisms create specific privacy risks for lactation clients.

03

Explain the health equity dimensions of data privacy, including the differential risks faced by clients from marginalized communities in the current data collection and legal enforcement landscape.

04

Apply HIPAA’s Privacy Rule to the specific practice contexts of an IBCLC in the United States, including covered entity status, Protected Health Information, the minimum necessary standard, and the scope and limits of Business Associate Agreements.

05

Describe the 2024 Reproductive Health Privacy Final Rule and explain its specific implications for lactation records in the post-Dobbs regulatory environment, including what it covers and what it does not.

06

Identify applicable US state privacy laws and explain how they interact with HIPAA protections for IBCLCs practicing across state lines, including through virtual consultations.

07

Conduct a privacy risk assessment of the primary communication channels in a lactation private practice — including email, text messaging, video platforms, cloud storage, devices, and social media — and identify the compliance status and risk level of each.

08

Evaluate vendor Business Associate Agreements and apply them to a comprehensive technology stack including EHR systems, telehealth platforms, AI documentation tools, cloud storage, email marketing platforms, and payment processors.

09

Explain the privacy implications of AI ambient documentation tools, distinguish between compliant and non-compliant approaches to AI use in clinical lactation practice, and describe a specific workflow for compliant case study creation using AI documentation tools.

10

Describe the privacy risks of health and baby tracking apps used by lactation clients — including data monetization, secondary market exposure, and post-Dobbs reproductive health data concerns — and articulate an approach to client privacy education that is informative, accurate, and consistent with client autonomy.

11

Apply the four elements of specific, informed, voluntary, and revocable consent to the use of client images and stories in marketing content, and describe the ethical and practical protocol for responding when a client withdraws consent for published content.

12

Apply the IBLCE Code of Professional Conduct to privacy-related practice scenarios involving client confidentiality, social media conduct, digital communications, professional boundaries with clients on social media, and the use of non-HIPAA-compliant platforms in marketing activities.

Course Modules:

Annie Frisbie IBCLC Inc has been accepted by the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners® (IBLCE®) as a Preferred Provider for the listed Continuing Education Recognition Points (CERPs) programme. Determination of CERPs eligibility or CERPs Provider status does not imply IBLCE’s endorsement or assessment of education quality. As a Preferred Provider, Annie Frisbie IBCLC Inc attests that it complies with the WHO Code and subsequent WHA resolutions.

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Annie Frisbie IBCLC, Inc actively supports the World Health Organization (WHO) International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes and subsequent World Health Assembly (WHA) resolutions. Therefore, Annie Frisbie IBCLC, Inc is not a company, inclusive of manufacturers, distributors, or marketers, whose products fall within the scope of the World Health Organization (WHO) International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes (1981) and subsequent World Health Assembly (WHA) resolutions (e.g., infant formula, bottles, and teats).

Your Practice, Their Data

Privacy Ethics and Risk Management for Lactation Consultants

Includes private podcast feed!

Annie Frisbie, MA, IBCLC, PMH-C

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Course Modules: