HIPAA Compliance Checklist for Healthcare App Development

If you're building anything that touches patient data in the US, HIPAA changes actual architecture decisions — retrofitting it later is painful. Here's what needs to be true from day one:

Encryption everywhere** — at rest and in transit, not just "we use HTTPS." Database-level encryption, encrypted backups, encrypted logs if they contain PHI.
Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with every vendor that touches PHI — cloud host, analytics, error-logging, email provider. A single uncovered vendor is a real liability, including your crash reporting tool.
Access controls and audit logging — who accessed what record, when, and why needs to be logged and reviewable. Often the first thing an auditor asks for.
Authentication that actually holds up — MFA for staff-facing access, session timeouts, no shared logins.
Data minimization— don't collect or store PHI you don't need. The safest data is data you never collected.
A real incident response plan, written before you need it.

The pattern we see most: teams treat compliance as a checklist right before launch, when it's actually an architecture decision that should shape the data model, vendor selection, and logging strategy from the first sprint.

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