The traditional route to HIPAA compliance is full of repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks: completing a risk assessment and gap analysis, designing and implementing security and privacy safeguards, training staff, writing policies and business associate agreements, and much more. And you'd have to track everything in spreadsheets and organize compliance evidence. 

Achieving and maintaining HIPAA compliance takes a dedicated team of compliance officers and company leaders, and possibly hiring expensive HIPAA consultants to assist you. 

Security and privacy compliance automation software eliminates a significant amount of these manual tasks, saving your organization hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on policy creation, external security training, and consultant fees. Below, we’ll explain what compliance automation software does and share tips for deciding if it’s the right choice for your healthcare organization.

What is HIPAA compliance automation?

HIPAA automation software simplifies and streamlines the compliance process by giving healthcare organizations a single tool to monitor and manage their compliance efforts.

To help identify the most compelling benefits of compliance automation software, we used data from a 2024 survey of Secureframe users conducted by UserEvidence. Let's take a look at these benefits below.

Reduces manual work and costs

HIPAA compliance often requires organizations to spend their limited resources on manual tasks like gathering evidence, training and tracking employee security training, managing vendors and business associate agreements, maintaining policies, and more. All of this busy work means less time for other high-priority, revenue-generating tasks.

A compliance automation platform that automates tasks required to get and stay HIPAA compliant — including evidence collection, continuous monitoring, policy management, risk assessments, and task management — can reduce the costs and efforts required to manage a compliance program. A platform with AI capabilities can further automate manual tasks, like performing risk assessments and updating HIPAA policies, to supercharge your teams and enable them to focus on higher priorities.

Reducing the manual overhead of compliance is a top benefit reported by Secureframe users. In the UserEvidence survey, 97% of Secureframe users said they reduced time spent on compliance tasks per month, with 76% saying they reduced that time by at least half. 85% also said they unlocked annual cost savings.

Spots gaps in your system configurations and internal controls

Understanding what gaps exist in your controls and policies and how to fill them is essential for achieving and maintaining HIPAA compliance. A compliance automation tool like Secureframe can automate this gap analysis. Once you integrate the audit-relevant softwares and tools you use every day, you can see exactly what you need to do based on your unique configurations and IT infrastructure. As you work through the HIPAA framework and complete activities within the Secureframe platform, it will update showing your progress percentage toward compliance, ensuring you have peace of mind.

Secureframe goes one step further, helping you implement best-in-class security practices. Our compliance experts offer advice based on your unique systems and business needs and they’ll be able to identify gaps in your system and controls to enhance your overall security posture.

Due to this automation and expertise, 97% said they strengthened their security and compliance posture.

Streamlines policy management

Instead of writing all of your own HIPAA policies from scratch, the best security and privacy compliance automation platforms offer a library of auditor-approved policy templates that you can customize to the needs of your healthcare organization. 

In addition to policy templates, the best tools provide a policy editor for quickly customizing policies and leaving comments, the ability to assign owners, and version history to track changes. You may also be able to track which employees have accepted HIPAA policies and send reminders to those who still need to in the same place that you create those policies. As your compliance program scales and the number of internal policies and employees increases, a tool like this can simplify and streamline policy management. 

Due to these and other automation capabilities simplifying compliance tasks, 95% of Secureframe users said they saved time and resources obtaining and maintaining compliance.

Offers assurance of continuous compliance

Compliance automation platforms integrate with your existing tech stack to continuously monitor and collect evidence on your administrative and technical safeguards for protecting ePHI. You’ll be able to get an accurate, real-time picture into your compliance status and monitor for non-compliance.

And our internal HIPAA compliance experts will share personalized guidance based on your unique systems and business needs. They’ll be there at every step of the compliance journey, from understanding legal requirements and implementing safeguards to keeping your entire security and privacy program running smoothly. 

Using a compliance automation platform backed by experts to make continuous monitoring more cost-effective, consistent, and efficient unlocks a range of benefits, according to Secureframe customers. In the UserEvidence survey, 75% of Secureframe users said they reduced the risk of non-compliance and 71% said they improved visibility into security and compliance posture.

Simplifies compliance across frameworks

HIPAA compliance often overlaps with other security frameworks such as SOC 2 and HITRUST.  

Instead of starting from ground zero, compliance software can help map what you’ve already done to achieve compliance with HIPAA to other information security frameworks. It'll be faster and easier to achieve additional certifications and avoid duplicated efforts.

As a result of Secureframe’s control mapping and other automation capabilities, 89% of Secureframe users surveyed by UserEvidence said they sped up time-to-compliance for multiple frameworks by at least 10%. Over half (53%) said they sped up time-to-compliance by 76% or more. 

While HIPAA automation software can be incredibly beneficial, it’s important to avoid over-reliance on a tool. HIPAA compliance officers and other stakeholders must continue to prioritize a strong data security and privacy strategy, own risk and change management processes, and understand how HIPAA safeguards are implemented and maintained. Use the software to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks like policy creation, security training, evidence collection, and vendor risk management.

Who needs compliance automation software?

Compliance management tools can be an essential part of your tech stack, but how do you know it’s time to look for a vendor?

If the following applies to your organization, a compliance automation tool probably makes sense for your needs:

• Your company is (or customers are) in the healthcare industry or other industries where compliance is required
• Prospects are asking whether your organization is compliant with HIPAA
• Your team is spending a significant amount of time and resources on highly manual and repetitive tasks like evidence collection
• You've had a HIPAA penalty or fine in the past and are looking to rebuild trust with patients and other stakeholders
• You'd like peace of mind that you're maintaining compliance, even as HIPAA standards are updated or your organization undergoes changes

How to Choose a Compliance Automation Platform

The security, privacy, and compliance software landscape is a fast-growing space, with a growing number of vendors to choose from. Keep these questions in mind as you evaluate potential solutions to help decide which is the best fit for your organization: 

• Are your chosen security frameworks supported? Be sure to consider any you may need as your company grows.
• Is the number and depth of integrations enough to save your team from excess work? To evaluate this, ask vendors about the integrations you need. What do these integrations do and what data do they collect?
• Does the platform include data security and privacy training, or will you need to pay for another external vendor?
• What is the level of customer support? What channels are available to receive support?

Key Features of Compliance Automation Software

We also used data from the 2024 survey of Secureframe users conducted by UserEvidence to identify the key features of compliance automation below.

Continuous monitoring

Compliance doesn’t end with certification. Choose a tool that alerts you to issues that could threaten your compliance. Some tools will even provide detailed guidance for correcting each issue so you’ll know for sure it’s fixed. 

Secureframe goes one step further with Comply AI for Remediation, which automatically generates remediation guidance tailored to your environment. This improves the ease and speed of fixing failing controls in your cloud environment to improve test pass rate and get HIPAA compliant faster.

84% of Secureframe users in the UserEvidence survey reported continuous monitoring to detect and remediate misconfigurations as an important Secureframe feature to them, making it the top answer. 

Automated Evidence Collection

Eliminating tedious, manual tasks is one of the core advantages of HIPAA compliance software. Look for a tool that includes a wide range of integrations that automatically collect evidence to support your compliance posture.

When asked what the most important Secureframe features are to them, 79% of Secureframe users said automated evidence collection.

Integrations

Ideally, you want an automation platform that can act as a central place to track and hold evidence for your entire HIPAA compliance program. That means you'll want a tool that offers integrations to audit-relevant softwares and tools you use every day.

It's also important to look for a tool that offers both breadth and depth of integrations so that it's pulling in all the compliance data you need, not just user data like names and emails. For example, Secureframe's integration with Crowdstrike goes deeper than user data and actually checks device security hygiene. This depth of integration is possible because Secureframe has its own integration builder that allows it to build any integration into any system for automated evidence collection and continuous control monitoring, rather than outsource this to a third-party integration broker. This way, Secureframe has ultimate control over the breadth and depth of integrations so it can be the source of truth for any organization.

The UserEvidence survey of Secureframe users substantiated that this was a driving factor for compliance automation adoption. When asked what challenges led them to purchase Secureframe, 57% of Secureframe users reported a lack of centralized, single source of truth in storing and managing security compliance data.

Policy Management

If you don’t already have a set of HIPAA policies in place, weeding through legal jargon to write them all from scratch can be time-consuming and stressful. Many HIPAA compliance solutions offer a library of templated policies that are approved by a team of HIPAA experts, making it much easier and faster to build out your policies and ensure they’re compliant with the law.

Some tools can also make it easier for you to tailor your policies to your organization and easily manage and distribute them to employees so you never fall out of compliance. 

The UserEvidence survey confirmed that robust policy management capabilities was a major benefit of compliance automation. When asked to select the most important Secureframe features to them, 68% of Secureframe users chose policy management.

Employee Onboarding and Offboarding

Keeping your team up-to-date on your HIPAA policies and procedures is an essential part of achieving and maintaining compliance. Compliance automation software can verify that every member of your staff completes regular security training and policy reviews. When you need to revoke access for former employees, the software can make that easy, too.

61% of Secureframe users selected personnel management as one of the most important features to them.

Risk Management

Like many other compliance frameworks, HIPAA includes requirements for risk management. Some automation tools can help improve the accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness of risk management.

Secureframe, for example, automatically gather information from different sources, figures out which risks are most important, suggests ways to reduce or handle these risks, and monitors risks over time. It also incorporates AI capabilities to automate risk assessments and other parts of the risk management process. 

As a result of these capabilities and benefits, 50% of Secureframe users in the UserEvidence survey reported risk management as an important Secureframe feature to them.

Vendor and Business Associate Management

Managing business associate and vendor risk can be incredibly complicated. Choosing a tool that collects all of your business associate agreements in one spot simplifies the entire process. 

The value of compliance automation on vendor management was supported by our UserEvidence survey findings as well. 55% of Secureframe users reported vendor risk management and vendor access management as important features to them.

Asset Inventory

Compiling and maintaining an inventory of assets manually in a spreadsheet is tedious and difficult to keep up-to-date. A HIPAA automation tool can keep an up-to-date inventory of all your assets for improved visibility and monitoring.

55% of Secureframe users selected endpoint/asset inventory as one of the most important features to them.

Expert, end-to-end support

Look for solutions that have a team of experienced compliance experts on staff who can help you navigate the complexity and growing challenges of HIPAA compliance.

Secureframe's team of compliance experts will be by your side to answer any technical questions and offer personalized security advice based on years of experience.

This type of support is a major benefit considering that 67% of Secureframe users said limited knowledge and expertise in compliance and security matters was a major challenge that led them to purchase Secureframe.

About the UserEvidence Survey

The data about Secureframe users was obtained through an online survey conducted by UserEvidence in February 2024. The survey included responses from 44 Secureframe users (the majority of whom were manager-level or above) across the information technology, consumer discretionary, industrials, financial, and healthcare industries.