Skip to main content
Patient Protect circular logo mark in purple and white used for site navigationPatient Protect

HIPAA compliance operating system

$6.64M

What a healthcare breach costs on average — highest of any industry for 13 years.1

HIPAA compliance software for independent practices.

HIPAA compliance should do more than prepare you for an audit. It should help prevent a breach.

Patient Protect brings HIPAA compliance, security safeguards, and everyday practice operations into one connected operating system. Manage risk assessments, policies, workforce training, secure communications, and ongoing compliance — with clear next steps and the evidence to support them.

Why we built Patient Protect

Independent practices carry hospital-grade obligations without hospital-grade resources.

Small healthcare practices are responsible for protecting the same sensitive patient information as major health systems, but rarely have the dedicated security teams, budgets, or infrastructure to manage that responsibility. We built Patient Protect to close that gap — making comprehensive HIPAA compliance and practical security tools accessible to the offices that need them most.

Patient data moves through employees, vendors, devices, inboxes, forms, referrals, cloud applications, and physical workflows. Most practices have no central system for seeing the full surface — until something fails.

Ongoing tracking of breach reports, enforcement actions, and compliance updates runs in HIPAA Response — our regulatory and breach intelligence tracker.

Small practices aren’t too small to be targeted.

Patient information is valuable regardless of the size of the organization holding it. Independent practices and the vendors they depend on face many of the same threats as major health systems, often without comparable resources to detect, contain, or recover from an incident. Read the research

Smaller healthcare breaches, tracked over time.

Filtered to breaches under 50,000 individuals affected · updated daily

Illustration of patient data fanning out across multiple unmonitored channels in an independent practiceCalendar-decay visualization showing compliance state drifting day by day after a single annual assessmentVisual contrast between a tidy compliance binder and the operational reality of staff workflows

Where the breach surface hides.

Patient data exposure rarely comes from a single obvious failure. It builds through everyday handoffs, changes in people and technology, and compliance records that gradually fall out of sync with how the practice actually operates.

Patient data moves through more places than most practices can see.

Inbox. Personal phone. SaaS vendor. Paper intake. Fax. Integration. Every handoff creates another ePHI pathway — and another place for visibility to disappear.

Patient Protect maps where sensitive data actually moves — ePHI pathways, vendor connections, and the gaps between them.

HIPAA compliance requires more than written policies.

Creating a policy is one step. Putting it into practice is what protects patient information. Patient Protect connects compliance requirements to the safeguards and everyday workflows behind them — from access controls and secure messaging to vendor agreements, staff responsibilities, and audit evidence.

The moment

01A login from an unrecognized device.

Documentation says

Restrict access to authorized devices.

Patient Protect does

01Prompts re-authentication.

02Captures device fingerprint.

03Notifies the security officer.

The moment

02A vendor's BAA expires.

Documentation says

Maintain current BAAs.

Patient Protect does

01Raises it as an open issue.

02Blocks Secure Messaging with that vendor.

The moment

03New hire gets full admin.

Documentation says

Apply minimum necessary access.

Patient Protect does

01Access follows the roles on their record, not a default.

The moment

04A required policy passes its adoption deadline.

Documentation says

Reassess annually.

Patient Protect does

01Surfaces it as an open issue.

02Closes itself when adopted.

Security safeguards are built in from day one.

Unlike starting a compliance program from a blank checklist, Patient Protect begins with important protections built into the platform. Encryption, role-based access controls, audit logging, and BAA-gated secure messaging are part of the environment from the start. Guided setup then helps your practice establish the people, policies, and workflows needed to operate its compliance program.

See the implementation methodology

Based on internal review of platform architecture and guided onboarding.

Account creation

Baseline structural safeguards

Encryption, role-based access, audit logging, and BAA-gated messaging in place before your first click.

Guided setup

Compliance workflow initialized

One guided hour establishes the platform's compliance workflow — before you write your first practice-specific policy.

Evaluating HIPAA compliance platforms?

Before choosing HIPAA compliance software, ask these ten questions.

Not every compliance platform operates the same way. Understand which tools document requirements, which help put safeguards into practice, and what your office will still need to manage on its own.

Run the ten-question vendor test

One HIPAA compliance operating system. Every part of your practice, connected.

Risk assessments, policies, staff training, vendor agreements, access management, secure communication, and audit evidence in one connected environment — instead of managing compliance across disconnected systems.

Compliance

Manage regulatory responsibilities, assessments, policies, training, and documentation.

Security

Put appropriate safeguards and governed workflows around sensitive patient information.

Operations

Reduce fragmented administration and coordinate recurring responsibilities.

Assess → Act → Document → Monitor → Improve

Your SRA generates your risk queue. Your risk queue gates your BAAs. Your BAAs control your messaging. Your messaging generates your audit trail. Your audit trail feeds your next SRA. Compliance, as a closed loop.

SystemDefenseOperationsNetworkIntelligence
Patient Protect platform tour thumbnail

Watch the platform tour — 5 min

Know where you stand. Know what needs work. Prove what’s been done.

Patient Protect gives your office a current view of its HIPAA compliance program — what’s complete, what needs attention, who’s responsible, and what evidence is available when it’s requested.

See the state

Understand where the practice stands today.

Current compliance score, unresolved risks, overdue requirements, vendor status, and workforce obligations — visible in one place, updated as the practice changes.

Change the state

Assign, remediate, and keep recurring work moving.

Every finding gets an owner, a deadline, and a workflow. Recurring compliance work runs on schedule instead of surfacing during an audit.

Prove the state

Produce evidence when it is asked for.

Training records, acknowledgments, vendor documentation, risk decisions, access activity, and completed remediation — preserved as the record OCR would request.

“
Exactly what small clinics like ours need to stay safe without hiring an IT team.
Dr. Thomas E Murray, D.D.S. · Patient Protect Member Since 2017
Dr. Thomas E MurrayD.D.S. · Patient Protect Member Since 2017

HIPAA Foundation

The HIPAA Foundation, free to use, cite and build on.

19 tools, an open breach dataset, an iOS app, a Chrome extension, and research — the public knowledge layer that sits underneath the product, free to use without an account and free to cite without asking us. It is the part we publish.

Read the announcement →Free · CC BY 4.0 / MIT / CC0
Free · proprietary

Risk Assessment

A unified risk and readiness assessment combining compliance readiness, entity classification, practice profile, and ePHI data flow into a single Patient Protect Score. Not a full HIPAA Security Risk Analysis — see the platform's guided SRA for that.

Open →
Free · proprietary

The Naughty List

Check whether a specific technology your practice runs — an EHR or practice-management system, imaging or PACS, a clinical device, an interface engine, an operating system, firewall or remote-access tool — has a documented security risk. Every finding carries the vendor, maintainer or government advisory it rests on, and the answer states how much of the product was actually checked.

Open →
MIT

HIPAA Shield — Browser Extension

Chrome Web Store extension that warns when PHI is typed or pasted into a browser form — especially consumer AI chat tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Detection runs inside the browser. Zero network requests, no telemetry, MIT licensed.

Open →
CC BY 4.0

Healthcare Breach Dataset

Citable CC BY 4.0 dataset of US healthcare breaches sourced from the HHS Office for Civil Rights Breach Portal. Severity scoring, editorial enrichment, no AI-modeled projections. CSV + JSON. License and attribution metadata included in the download body. For researchers, journalists, and AI-search engines.

Open →
Free · proprietary

Patient Protect Signal

The free iOS app that packages breach intelligence, tools, and awareness for small practices.

Open →
Free · proprietary

Ask PIPAA

An AI HIPAA compliance assistant that answers your questions about the Security Rule, Privacy Rule, breach response, risk analysis, and more — free, instant, no login required.

Open →
Free · proprietary

HIPAA Readiness Scan

See what your practice website exposes from the outside. Checks tracking technologies, security configuration, email protection, and required privacy notices — in about 30 seconds.

Open →

From the blog

What independent practices are reading right now.

The evidence base behind everything we build.

Secure Care Research Institute publishes the working papers and dataset methodology behind Patient Protect’s market thesis on independent-practice exposure.

All research

Six questions we get a lot.

01

What is Patient Protect?

Patient Protect is a security-first HIPAA compliance operating system built for independent healthcare providers. It brings risk assessments, policies, workforce training, vendor agreements, secure communications, and audit evidence into one connected environment — without enterprise pricing or complexity.

02

How much does Patient Protect cost?

Patient Protect offers two plans, priced per office: Basic at $39/month per office (up to 25 office personnel) is the complete core compliance and security platform, secure messaging included. Pro at $99/month per office (up to 50 office personnel) adds the patient workspace, digital forms and expanded PIPAA usage. Larger single-office practices scale predictably with per-5-personnel add-ons published on the pricing page. Multi-office practice networks — DSOs, MSOs, and specialty groups — use custom pricing that reflects the office count, vendor surface, and HIPAA-specific coordination each network requires. Contact us for a network quote. Both plans start with a 14-day trial of the full Basic plan; Pro workflows are not part of the trial (credit card required for identity verification — no charge until trial ends). A free risk assessment is also available with no account required.

03

Is Patient Protect priced per office or per organization?

Per office. Each office instance covers the personnel and workflows for a single location — because each office has its own workforce roster, its own vendor set, its own BAAs, its own physical safeguards, and its own PHI-flow surface, even when several offices roll up to the same covered entity. A multi-office practice with three offices runs three Patient Protect instances at their tier's per-office rate; consolidated reporting is available across them. Practice networks with more than a handful of offices — DSOs, MSOs, therapy groups, specialty consolidators — should request a network quote so the price reflects office count, cross-office workflows, centralized oversight, and any shared-vendor coordination the network requires.

04

Who is Patient Protect designed for?

Independent healthcare providers including dental practices, medical offices, behavioral health and therapy practices, chiropractic offices, physical therapy centers, optometry practices, and dermatology clinics. It is not designed for large hospital systems or enterprise organizations with dedicated IT departments.

05

Does Patient Protect help with the HIPAA Security Risk Assessment?

Yes. Patient Protect includes an automated Security Risk Assessment (SRA) tool mapped to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. It identifies vulnerabilities, scores risk, and generates documentation required by the HIPAA Security Rule.

06

What free HIPAA tools does Patient Protect offer?

More than 20 free tools and resources with no login required — including Ask PIPAA (AI HIPAA compliance assistant), the Unified Risk Assessment, the HIPAA Readiness Scan, the ePHI Data Flow Mapper, the HIPAA Breach Dashboard, and the HIPAA Risk Calculator. See the complete catalog at /free-tools.

See your compliance state. Close the gaps. Preserve the evidence.

See where your practice stands today. Then use Patient Protect to close the gaps and keep them closed. Plans start at $39/month. The 14-day free trial requires a credit card for verification — no charge until it ends.