Healthcare providers must meet stringent HIPAA requirements for protecting electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI). This checklist covers the technical safeguards every practice needs to implement.
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The HIPAA Security Rule requires three categories of safeguards: administrative, physical, and technical. From an IT perspective, the technical safeguards are where most practices need the most support. These include access controls with unique user identification and emergency access procedures, audit controls that record and examine activity in systems containing ePHI, integrity controls that protect ePHI from improper alteration or destruction, transmission security including encryption for ePHI transmitted over networks, and authentication mechanisms to verify that persons seeking access to ePHI are who they claim to be.
Document safeguards and ongoing work
In practice, this translates to implementing MFA on all systems that access patient data, encrypting all endpoints (laptops, desktops, mobile devices), encrypting email and file transfers containing ePHI, maintaining detailed audit logs with minimum 6-year retention, conducting annual risk assessments, and establishing documented incident response procedures.
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2026 update: the fundamentals in this checklist still apply, but HHS has been actively modernizing the Security Rule — with proposed changes that would make controls like MFA, encryption, and asset inventories explicitly mandatory rather than 'addressable.' Healthcare practices should read our current guide to the 2026 HIPAA Security Rule changes and treat this checklist as the floor, not the ceiling.
Updated . This update covers structure, reference context and company-claim corrections.
