It's the price of entry in healthcare
No healthcare customer will touch a vendor that can't demonstrate HIPAA safeguards — and they'll want a signed BAA before go-live.
Safeguards for protected health information.
HIPAA governs how protected health information (PHI) is handled in the US. The Security Rule mandates administrative, physical and technical safeguards; the Privacy Rule governs use and disclosure; the Breach Notification Rule sets response obligations.
The standard
HIPAA — US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Who needs it
Covered entities (providers, health plans) and their business associates — including any software vendor that creates, receives, maintains or transmits PHI.
3
Rules: Security · Privacy · Breach
The basics
HIPAA is the US law that governs how protected health information (PHI) is handled. If your product touches health data — or your customers' does — it sets the rules for keeping that data private and secure, and for what happens if it leaks.
For software companies, the Security Rule is where most of the work lives: administrative, physical and technical safeguards for electronic PHI. The Privacy Rule governs how PHI can be used and shared, and the Breach Notification Rule starts a clock ticking the moment something goes wrong.
Why it matters
No healthcare customer will touch a vendor that can't demonstrate HIPAA safeguards — and they'll want a signed BAA before go-live.
Violations carry serious fines and reputational damage. Getting the safeguards right protects the business, not just the data.
Healthcare buyers are risk-averse by nature. Demonstrable HIPAA compliance is how you earn the benefit of the doubt.
Administrative, physical and technical safeguards for electronic PHI.
Rules for the permitted use and disclosure of PHI.
Defined obligations and timelines when PHI is exposed.
Contracts that flow safeguards down the supply chain.
HIPAA has no certificate to hang on the wall, which tempts teams to treat it as a paperwork exercise — until a customer's security review or an actual incident exposes the gaps. Evidence you can produce on demand beats a policy nobody's read.
Do it once, reuse it everywhere. Evidence you collect for HIPAAis automatically mapped to every other framework whose controls it also satisfies — and since these standards overlap heavily, most of that work isn't repeated.
See exactly how Compliance One maps HIPAA to your environment in a 30-minute walkthrough — and how much of it we handle for you.