Industry guide
HIPAA for Physician Practices
Right-sized HIPAA guidance for practices balancing patient rights, workforce access, billing, and technology vendors.
Reviewed August 2026
Key considerations
- EHR, billing, labs, referral, messaging, and cloud services can create a distributed data flow.
- Small teams still need clear privacy, security, incident, and continuity ownership.
- Vendor agreements and offboarding are important when administrative functions are outsourced.
Starting points
- Inventory systems, devices, vendors, and paper-to-electronic flows.
- Train the workforce on access, disclosure, phishing, and incident reporting.
- Test backup restoration and patient-request workflows.