HIPAA Compliance

HIPAA Compliance

Use this as the HIPAA-specific entrypoint when a task is clearly about US healthcare compliance. This skill intentionally stays thin and canonical:

• healthcare-phi-compliance remains the primary implementation skill for PHI/PII handling, data classification, audit logging, encryption, and leak prevention.
• healthcare-reviewer remains the specialized reviewer when code, architecture, or product behavior needs a healthcare-aware second pass.
• security-review still applies for general auth, input-handling, secrets, API, and deployment hardening.

When to Use

• The request explicitly mentions HIPAA, PHI, covered entities, business associates, or BAAs
• Building or reviewing US healthcare software that stores, processes, exports, or transmits PHI
• Assessing whether logging, analytics, LLM prompts, storage, or support workflows create HIPAA exposure
• Designing patient-facing or clinician-facing systems where minimum necessary access and auditability matter

How It Works

Treat HIPAA as an overlay on top of the broader healthcare privacy skill:

1. Start with healthcare-phi-compliance for the concrete implementation rules.
2. Apply HIPAA-specific decision gates:
   • Is this data PHI?
   • Is this actor a covered entity or business associate?
   • Does a vendor or model provider require a BAA before touching the data?
   • Is access limited to the minimum necessary scope?
   • Are read/write/export events auditable?
3. Escalate to healthcare-reviewer if the task affects patient safety, clinical workflows, or regulated production architecture.

HIPAA-Specific Guardrails

• Never place PHI in logs, analytics events, crash reports, prompts, or client-visible error strings.
• Never expose PHI in URLs, browser storage, screenshots, or copied example payloads.
• Require authenticated access, scoped authorization, and audit trails for PHI reads and writes.
• Treat third-party SaaS, observability, support tooling, and LLM providers as blocked-by-default until BAA status and data boundaries are clear.
• Follow minimum necessary access: the right user should only see the smallest PHI slice needed for the task.
• Prefer opaque internal IDs over names, MRNs, phone numbers, addresses, or other identifiers.

Examples

Example 1: Product request framed as HIPAA

User request:

Add AI-generated visit summaries to our clinician dashboard. We serve US clinics and need to stay HIPAA compliant.

Response pattern:

• Activate hipaa-compliance
• Use healthcare-phi-compliance to review PHI movement, logging, storage, and prompt boundaries
• Verify whether the summarization provider is covered by a BAA before any PHI is sent
• Escalate to healthcare-reviewer if the summaries influence clinical decisions

Example 2: Vendor/tooling decision

User request:

Can we send support transcripts and patient messages into our analytics stack?

Response pattern:

• Assume those messages may contain PHI
• Block the design unless the analytics vendor is approved for HIPAA-bound workloads and the data path is minimized
• Require redaction or a non-PHI event model when possible

Related Skills

• healthcare-phi-compliance
• healthcare-reviewer
• healthcare-emr-patterns
• healthcare-eval-harness
• security-review