HIPAA for software teams (without slowing shipping)
HIPAA gets treated like a legal problem. On engineering teams it’s usually a workflow problem: engineers make data decisions every day.
This is general guidance, not legal advice — your compliance/legal team owns the details. Your job is to make “doing the right thing” the default.
What EMs should standardize
If your team touches PHI, align on these basics:
- Know what counts as PHI in your org. Don’t make every engineer guess.
- Minimum necessary is a design constraint. Build role-based views and limit fields by default.
- Logs stay PHI-free. Log request IDs, outcomes, and safe identifiers — not payloads.
- Dev/test uses de-identified or synthetic data. Copying prod PHI to laptops is a trap.
- Access is least-privilege + auditable. No shared accounts, MFA where it matters, and access reviews with an owner.
- Vendors aren’t “just tools.” If a vendor stores/transmits PHI, route it through the right agreements and review process.
- Incidents have a path. Engineers should know exactly who to pull in and what to do first.
What staff+ engineers care about
Staff engineers don’t want compliance theater. They want clear boundaries:
- what data is sensitive
- where it’s allowed to live
- what “safe by default” means in code (and in logs)
When those boundaries are explicit, engineers ship faster because they stop debating every edge case.
Where DawnOps fits
DawnOps includes a “HIPAA Compliance Basics” module focused on practical engineering decisions (access, logging, data handling, incident response) so teams share the same baseline language.
Related reading
- SOC 2 evidence that doesn’t feel like paperwork
- SOC2 for Builders, Part 2: Data Classification and Logging Hygiene