HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act governs how protected health information is handled in the United States.
HIPAA establishes national standards for the protection of Protected Health Information (PHI). The Privacy Rule governs how PHI can be used and disclosed. The Security Rule sets standards for electronic PHI. The Breach Notification Rule mandates how organizations must respond to and report security incidents involving PHI.
Most engineering teams treat HIPAA as a compliance checkbox — a legal review exercise performed after the system is built. This is backwards. HIPAA compliance that is retrofitted onto an existing architecture costs 3-5x more than HIPAA compliance built into the architecture from the first design decision. The encryption requirements, audit logging mandates, and data minimization principles must shape how data flows through the entire system.
Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) are required for any third-party service that processes PHI on your behalf — including cloud providers, analytics platforms, and AI inference services. A cloud-native system built for a healthcare client requires BAAs with AWS, GCP, or Azure, and cannot use services for which BAAs are unavailable.
We architect HIPAA compliance from the first infrastructure decision — selecting the right cloud region and configuration, enforcing encryption at rest and in transit automatically, building audit logging as a first-class system component, and generating compliance documentation as a byproduct of the build process. Our teams work under BAAs with all major cloud providers.
Compliance-Native Architecture Guide
Design principles and a structured checklist for building software that is compliant by default — not compliant by retrofit. Covers data architecture, access controls, audit trails, and vendor due diligence.