Having worked in a HIPAA regulated space, I can say that hashing the username, such as the email address, for login purposes can allow for account recovery if t

Having worked in a HIPAA regulated space, I can say that hashing the username, such as the email address, for login purposes can allow for account recovery if the credentials are retained. At the same time the cleartext username and other PII can be stored in an object that is both encrypted at rest for its lifetime, and on top of that has its sensitive fields overwritten upon logical deletion. Account recovery cannot recover non-credential derived PII but that is a small annoyance to the user in order to be compliant and trustworthy. The internal user ID should be used throughout downstream reporting rather than actual PII for the sake of continuity and privacy.