Oct 9
2017
The 13th Factor in Building HIPAA-Compliant “12-Factor Apps”
Guest post by Lucas Vogel, principal consultant, Endpoint Systems.
Imagine being a software developer at a company where your job description involves building HIPAA-compliant apps and services. As you onboard with your new company, you receive some formal basic training and learn about the privacy, security and breach notification rules, and after some additional training on various topics about your job, you enter your department and get acquainted with your work environment. This is the point where you find out what you’re really getting yourself into.
There is a direct correlation between the maturity level of applications developed in your organization and the quality of your work life. For example, if you walk into a developer role for a healthcare provider, you’re likely walking into a large and well-established IT group with many old and new technology platforms deployed, where you’ll take your place with a department that’s existed for several years and does fairly predictable work on prebuilt systems. But let’s say you’re working at the more cutting edge of healthcare technology, at a startup straddling innovation with compliance. In that case, understanding HIPAA compliance can feel incredibly daunting, especially as you may essentially be learning as you go with little guidance.
The good news is that it’s never been a better time to work on HIPAA-compliant healthcare apps. Advances in identity and access management (IAM) and consent frameworks make it easier for apps to authenticate, authorize and audit users, logging who is performing what within your application; advances in machine learning make it easier to parse these log streams, detecting threats and anomalies to application use, among other countless benefits. Further advances in application architecture, cloud and API technologies, database and container platforms (not to mention containerized database platforms), and development methodologies over the past decade have dramatically changed the way companies build applications and deploy platforms, culminating in what is known as the “twelve-factor application.”