What is HIPAA?

HIPAA is a set of regulations from the US Department of Health and Human Services that outline the rules for protecting patient health information. These rules are very complex and come with stiff penalties for violations. In addition to HIPAA, there are also state laws that may apply to how an application handles sensitive data. Therefore, applications that handle any kind of patient health information must be designed in a way that complies with both federal and state regulations.

Articles related to HIPAA compliance include legal and technical guidance for software developers. These articles provide details about how healthcare companies can comply with HIPAA regulations and other considerations related to data security and privacy. Additional topics related to HIPAA compliance include technology and trends, security and privacy policy, reporting requirements, risk assessment, encryption techniques, cloud computing platforms, meta-data management solutions, health information exchange (HIE), vendor management services (VMS), patient consent templates for sharing patient data in the cloud, HIE agreements templates for sharing medical records between institutions or organizations such as hospitals or clinics that will be sent to patients by email when they sign up for care at a clinic or hospital.