13 Aug How Healthcare Organizations Can Tighten Their HIPAA Compliance
If you’re a healthcare organization handling Protected Health Information (PHI), you have an important job to do. You must keep it safe, whether in digital or physical form, including account numbers, lab test results, health cards, and anything else related to a patient’s healthcare. It’s not just a recommendation, either. It’s known as HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal law.
Doctors, clinics, psychologists, nursing homes, pharmacies, and a range of other entities must abide by comprehensive HIPAA rules and regulations to protect their patients’ privacy and themselves from legal repercussions. If your healthcare organization is overwhelmed by everything involved in HIPAA but you know you need to tighten your compliance, here’s how to get started.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Involve the Experts
When you know your strategies for HIPAA compliance aren’t what they should be, it can be of great value to bring in a trusted healthcare regulatory compliance attorney who can help you manage regulatory risks without losing sight of your business goals. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, HIPAA enforcement actions and resulting penalties have increased significantly in recent years, making proactive legal guidance more important than ever for covered entities of all sizes.
Healthcare regulatory compliance attorneys can advise you on the full range of regulatory and transactional matters affecting your operations and business decisions, including anti-kickback statute counseling, Stark Law compliance, HIPAA compliance, and billing and coding compliance. They can also assist with government investigations and audits, as well as internal investigations and self-disclosure when you’ve discovered your own compliance gaps. Essentially, industry attorneys can educate you on what you should be doing, highlight what you’re not doing, and guide you through becoming compliant for your peace of mind and that of your patients.
Conduct Regular Assessments and Audits
You can’t just assume that your PHI is secure because you’ve invested in good software. To ensure it remains secure, conduct regular assessments and audits. This process involves annual security risk analyses to map where your digital PHI is created, stored, or transmitted to identify vulnerabilities in the system. You should also perform network and software vulnerability scanning to identify gaps you must remedy. For comprehensive records tracking, maintain records of who accesses patient files and when.
Upgrade Your Safeguards
As technology advances, so must your safeguards. Routinely check your technical and physical safeguards to ensure they’re at the pinnacle of what’s expected for compliance. For example, all electronic health records, cloud services, remote VPNs, and internal endpoints must have multi-factor authentication. All data should also have absolute end-to-end encryption. You should also protect where devices and data are stored, which involves keeping server and device storage rooms accessible only to authorized personnel using role-based badges or keycards, while maintaining active visitor logs.
Prioritize Workplace Training
It’s not just your systems that can fail and cause HIPAA violations. Your human employees can also make mistakes. That’s why workplace training is so important. Customized, role-specific annual training for clinical, administrative, and IT staff is crucial for reducing the risk of human error and phishing attacks. During an exploratory analysis of past data breaches over a five-year period, the vast majority of health records were compromised due to poor human security. The analysis found that the mean number of records affected by breaches from unintentional insider threats is over twice that of breaches resulting from malicious intent, such as theft or external cyberattacks. The more frequent and comprehensive the training sessions are, the lower the risk of healthcare data breaches.
It’s easy to assume that your healthcare organization is at the cutting edge of HIPAA compliance, but assumptions don’t make facts. Upgrade your safeguards, invest in workplace training, seek external advice, and conduct audits and assessments. Your organization and patients can then enjoy more confidence and peace of mind.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult a licensed attorney for guidance specific to their situation.
For a broader overview of how healthcare organizations are approaching technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, and HIPAA compliance requirements in 2026, see this MedicalResearch.com overview of healthcare technology priorities for clinical companies.
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Last Updated on August 13, 2026 by Marie Benz MD FAAD