Now accepting new projects — limited slots available. Get started →

Your Patient Data Sits on Servers Built for Shopify. That's Your HIPAA Problem.

If you're a healthcare CTO inheriting legacy infrastructure, you're one breach notification away from a $50K OCR fine and front-page damage.

HIPAA-compliant infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud with signed BAAs, encrypted data pipelines, and audit-ready architecture.

Get a Free HIPAA Assessment See Our Process
HIPAA-Compliant Hosting

HIPAA-compliant hosting is something a lot of people think they understand until they're actually staring down an OCR audit. At its core, it's the configuration, deployment, and ongoing management of cloud infrastructure specifically hardened to meet the Security Rule's technical safeguard requirements -- and it applies to both covered entities and business associates. But here's the thing: it's never just one checkbox. We're talking about signed BAAs, granular access logging, breach detection pipelines, and documented risk analysis that gets updated when your infrastructure changes, not just when you're chasing an accreditation deadline. The encryption piece alone -- AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit -- is table stakes. What actually separates a compliant environment from a liability is how all those pieces connect: who can access what, when, and whether you can prove it six years later. I've built infrastructure for clinics in Austin, billing platforms in Chicago, and patient portals serving rural health networks, and the pattern is always the same. The technical controls are manageable. The contractual chain of custody and the documentation discipline are where organizations consistently fall short. We build and maintain this on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud depending on your existing contracts and workload requirements -- not because one platform is always the right answer, but because the right answer depends on what you've already committed to.

What is holding your current website back?

Common gaps we find in nearly every audit.

Here's a scenario I see constantly: an EHR or patient portal running on a shared hosting plan, or worse, a general e-commerce stack that was never designed to isolate PHI from anything
Risk: These environments were built to sell products or run marketing sites -- not to handle protected health information. And the real problem isn't just the technical exposure. Commingled environments make it structurally impossible to produce the access logs and audit trails OCR requires during a breach investigation. So what starts as a configuration gap turns into a compounding compliance failure. You can't reconstruct who accessed what PHI if the logs don't distinguish between workloads.
Unsigned BAAs are one of those violations that exist completely independently of whether a breach ever happens
Risk: Your vendor relationships -- cloud providers, CDN services, analytics platforms -- may include subcontractors that touch PHI every single day without a signed BAA in place, simply because nobody on the original team knew to ask for one. That's not a technicality. OCR treats it as a direct HIPAA violation, and it surfaces immediately during any third-party audit. It doesn't matter how good your encryption is if the contractual chain of custody has a gap.
Security documentation is the part that ages badly
Risk: A risk analysis written during an accreditation push in 2023, never touched since, doesn't reflect the infrastructure you're actually running today. Contingency plans referencing servers that were decommissioned two years ago. Workforce training records that stop before your last three hires. OCR investigators know what performative compliance looks like -- and outdated documentation is one of the clearest signals they use when weighing willful neglect penalties. It's honestly one of the easiest things to fix, and one of the most commonly ignored.

How We Build This Right

Every safeguard, built in from Day 1.

Signed Business Associate Agreements

Before any PHI gets near our managed infrastructure, we execute a BAA with your organization. Full stop. But we don't stop there -- we also coordinate BAA coverage across every cloud service and third-party integration that's in scope for your environment. The goal is a complete, documented contractual chain of custody. No gaps, no assumptions, no "we thought that vendor was covered."

Encryption and Access Control Architecture

PHI at rest is encrypted using AES-256. In transit, we enforce TLS 1.2 or higher -- no exceptions, no legacy fallback. Key management runs through AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, or Google Cloud KMS depending on your platform. Role-based access controls and MFA are enforced at every layer, and shared credentials simply don't exist in environments we build. That last point matters more than people think.

Audit-Ready Logging and Monitoring

Every access to a PHI-containing system gets logged, timestamped, and stored in tamper-evident archives for a minimum of six years. Automated alerting flags anomalous access patterns in real time -- not in a weekly digest nobody reads. Monthly reports are formatted specifically for direct submission during OCR inquiries, so you're not scrambling to reformat data when a request lands.

What We Build

Purpose-built features for your industry.

Multi-Cloud PHI Environment Deployment

PHI workloads live in isolated VPCs or VNets -- completely separate from any general-purpose, dev, or marketing infrastructure. We provision these across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud based on your existing licensing agreements and latency requirements. Putting PHI on the same network segment as your WordPress site isn't a configuration nuance, it's a structural problem. So we don't do it.

Encrypted Data Pipeline Configuration

The data pipelines connecting your EHR, patient portal, billing systems, and analytics platforms are often where unencrypted PHI transmission hides. We rebuild or reconfigure those pipelines to enforce encryption in transit end-to-end and eliminate any cleartext PHI moving between services. It's not glamorous work, but it's where real exposure lives in most environments we inherit.

Disaster Recovery and Contingency Planning

A contingency plan that's never been tested isn't a plan -- it's a document. We design backup and recovery procedures that actually meet the HIPAA Contingency Plan standard: documented RPO and RTO targets, automated encrypted backups, and failover testing conducted on a defined schedule with written results you can show an auditor. The testing cadence matters as much as the design.

Ongoing Vulnerability Management

Compliance drift is real. An environment that passes an audit in January can be out of spec by April if nobody's watching. Monthly automated scans catch the obvious stuff. Quarterly manual penetration testing -- scoped specifically to PHI-adjacent systems -- catches what automated tools miss. Plus a documented patch management schedule keeps you from discovering a six-month-old vulnerability during an incident, which is the worst possible time to find it.

Built on a Modern, Secure Stack

AWSAzureGoogle CloudNext.jsSupabaseVercelTerraformDocker

Our Development Process

From discovery to launch. Quality at every step.

01

Infrastructure and BAA Gap Audit

1-2 weeks

The first thing we do is map the actual environment -- not the architecture diagram from 2022, but what's running right now. We review your current hosting setup, vendor contracts, and existing security documentation to find every point where PHI is stored, processed, or transmitted without adequate technical or contractual safeguards. In practice, there are almost always surprises. A forgotten dev environment with production data. An analytics integration nobody documented. A CDN with no BAA.

02

Compliant Environment Architecture

1-2 weeks

Before writing a single line of infrastructure code, we design the full target-state architecture on your chosen cloud platform. Network segmentation, encryption configuration, IAM policies, logging architecture -- all of it gets defined on paper first. This isn't bureaucratic overhead. It's how you avoid building something you have to partially tear down six months later because access controls weren't thought through at the start.

03

Migration and BAA Execution

2-4 weeks

Migration happens under encrypted transfer protocols with zero unprotected PHI exposure during transition. BAAs are executed with your organization and all subprocessors before any live data moves -- not simultaneously, not afterward. The sequence matters contractually. And every step of the migration is documented so you have a defensible record of how PHI moved and who had access during the process.

04

Audit Documentation and Handoff

1-2 weeks

When the infrastructure is live, you get a complete documentation package: risk analysis, system activity review procedures, incident response runbook, and annotated architecture diagrams. Everything is formatted for OCR audit submission -- so when a request comes in, you're pulling files, not writing documents. Internal compliance teams also get versions structured for their own review cycles, because those are two different audiences.

Social Animal

Ready to discuss your your patient data sits on servers built for shopify. that's your hipaa problem. project?

Get a free quote
Related Resources
Solution
HIPAA Compliant Website Redesign
Solution
HIPAA Compliant Website Development
Solution
HIPAA Compliant CRM Patient Portal Development
Solution
HIPAA Compliant Forms Chat Development
Solution
HIPAA Compliance Audit Security Risk Assessment
Solution
HIPAA Compliance Consulting

Frequently Asked Questions

No -- and this is probably the most common misunderstanding I run into. AWS offers HIPAA-eligible services and will sign a BAA, but compliance is a shared responsibility model. You still have to correctly configure encryption, access controls, audit logging, and network isolation yourself. Plenty of healthcare organizations have breaches on AWS because they assumed the platform handled it. The platform provides the building materials. What you build with them -- and how you configure it -- is what actually determines compliance.
A BAA is a legally required contract between a covered entity and any vendor that handles PHI on their behalf. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all offer BAAs -- but here's the catch: each one covers only specific services within their platform. Using a service that isn't explicitly covered by the BAA to process PHI is a compliance violation, regardless of whatever else you have in place. So "we have a BAA with AWS" isn't sufficient if you're running PHI through a service that AWS's BAA doesn't cover.
Vercel and Netlify don't currently sign BAAs, so they can't host applications that process or store PHI. That's just the reality in 2026. But honestly, it's workable -- you can use them for static frontend assets that contain zero PHI while running your backend and database on BAA-covered AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud services. Plenty of teams do this successfully. The boundary just has to be clean and documented, not assumed.
Monthly infrastructure costs typically land between $500 and $5,000 depending on compute, storage, and data transfer volumes. The bigger number is usually the upfront architecture and configuration work -- and that's where I'd tell you not to cut corners. Trimming setup costs to reduce monthly spend is exactly how breaches happen. Our fixed-fee setup ensures the foundation is audit-ready before anything goes live, because retrofitting compliance onto a misconfigured environment costs far more than building it right once.
If your data genuinely meets all 18 Safe Harbor de-identification criteria under 45 CFR 164.514, it's no longer PHI and HIPAA's technical safeguards don't apply. But partial de-identification doesn't cut it. One remaining identifier -- a zip code combined with a rare diagnosis, a date of birth alongside a geographic region -- and you're back to full PHI treatment. We'll help you verify your de-identification methodology before you make that assumption, because assuming incorrectly is its own compliance exposure.
OCR asks for risk assessments, technical safeguards documentation, BAAs, access logs, breach response procedures, and employee training records going back six years. That's not a short list, and assembling it under pressure is painful. Our compliance documentation package is structured to answer those requests without the last-minute scramble. And because we build everything as infrastructure-as-code, every configuration decision is traceable and defensible -- you're not relying on someone's memory of why a security group was set up a certain way three years ago.
More solutions

Explore related industries

Lovable Agency -- Ship Your Lovable App for Real Users

Lovable got you a working prototype in days. We are the agency that makes it safe, fast, and maintainable -- or rebuilds it right when the platform ceiling arrives.

Hire an AI Developer -- or Hand Us the Whole Build

You searched for an AI developer. What you probably need is a shipped product: AI features that work, built by a senior team that uses AI tooling without shipping AI slop.

Replit Agency -- From Agent Prototype to Production App

Replit Agent got you 80 percent of the way. We are the agency that ships the last 20 -- auth, payments, performance, and a codebase your next developer will not curse at.
Need enterprise scale?

200+ employee company? Complex multi-tenant, auction, or multi-location requirement? We have a dedicated enterprise capability track.

View Enterprise Hub

Get Your Quote

Most quotes delivered within 24 hours.

Or book a 30-minute call
Get in touch

Let's build
something together.

Whether it's a migration, a new build, or an SEO challenge — the Social Animal team would love to hear from you.

Get in touch →