How Hounder Leverages Acquia for HIPAA Compliant Web Applications

As you may already know, HIPAA compliance is a huge component for healthcare organizations as its regulations are put in place to protect sensitive patient data (also known as Patient Health Information or PHI). Healthcare providers now, more than ever, rely on web platforms to engage with patients and manage their care plans, and ensuring these platforms are HIPAA compliant is a non-negotiable.

For web development agencies working with healthcare clients, this means delivering more than just beautiful, user-friendly websites. It means building digital experiences with security, data protection, and regulatory compliance at their core. Any lapse in compliance could lead to major legal and financial consequences for clients, which is why choosing the right infrastructure and development approach is crucial.

At Hounder, we specialize in creating modern, scalable, and secure digital platforms for organizations across industries, including healthcare. Our commitment to building compliant, high-performance web solutions is one of the reasons we partner with Acquia, a trusted digital experience platform that offers HIPAA-ready hosting and enterprise-level security features.

Let’s dig deeper into how we leverage Acquia’s platform to deliver HIPAA-compliant web solutions, and why it’s become our go-to solution for healthcare clients who can’t afford to compromise on security or compliance.

The Importance of Infusing HIPAA Compliance Into Your Web Environments

When it comes to healthcare websites and web applications, HIPAA compliance isn’t just a backend concern; it’s foundational to the way these platforms are designed, built, and maintained. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) outlines strict requirements for how organizations must protect Protected Health Information (PHI), which includes any data that can identify a patient and relates to their health status, care, or payment history.

For web applications, this means any form that collects patient information, patient portals, appointment scheduling tools, or integrated communication systems are all subject to HIPAA regulations. If PHI is being transmitted or stored (even temporarily), developers must ensure the platform meets the administrative, physical, and technical safeguards required by the law.

The risk of non-compliance is serious and may result in data breaches that can cause heavy financial penalties, reputational damage, and in some cases, legal action. From improperly secured databases to unencrypted transmissions or poor access controls, many common missteps can leave an organization vulnerable. That’s why prioritizing HIPAA compliance from the ground up is key.

Some of the most important components of HIPAA that directly influence web development include:

• Data Privacy: Web applications must ensure that PHI is only accessible to authorized individuals. This means implementing privacy-by-design principles, using secure session management, and avoiding unnecessary data retention.

• Security Measures: Technical safeguards such as encryption (in transit and at rest), secure hosting environments, and vulnerability patching are essential to protecting PHI from unauthorized access or cyberattacks.

• Access Control: Role-based access must be enforced throughout the application and hosting infrastructure to ensure that only those with a legitimate need can view or modify sensitive data.

• Audit Controls: Developers must ensure that the platform maintains detailed logs of access and activity, enabling administrators to detect unauthorized behavior and support forensic investigations if needed.

Why Hounder Chooses Acquia for HIPAA Compliance Web Platforms

At Hounder, we don’t take chances when it comes to secure and compliant web solutions, especially when we’re building digital platforms for clients in regulated industries like healthcare. One of the many reasons we choose to work with Acquia is because of their robust infrastructure and platform capabilities that support compliance with the HIPAA Security Rule and the HITECH Act for managing electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI).

What makes Acquia’s Cloud Platform a strong choice for HIPAA-compliant development is not just its certifications, but the practical security features it delivers out of the box. Here are a few that stand out to us based on our previous experience working with clients on this platform:

• Data Encryption: Acquia encrypts data using strong encryption protocols during transmission (TLS 1.2 or higher) and while stored on disk. This ensures PHI is protected both during user interactions and behind the scenes in infrastructure storage.

• Access Control and Identity Management: Fine-grained permissions and role-based access controls make it possible to tightly regulate who can access which parts of the system. This is critical in minimizing unauthorized exposure to sensitive health data.

• Backup and Disaster Recovery: Acquia provides robust automated backup systems and disaster recovery planning. This not only supports HIPAA’s availability and contingency planning requirements, but also gives our clients peace of mind that data can be quickly restored if needed.

• Logging and Audit Trails: The platform automatically logs system activity, administrative access, and changes to environments. This helps fulfill HIPAA’s audit control requirements and allows for effective monitoring and forensic analysis if a security incident occurs.

• Infrastructure Hardening and Monitoring: Acquia applies continuous security patching, vulnerability scanning, and intrusion detection at the infrastructure level. Their operations team actively monitors for suspicious behavior, reducing the risk of attacks before they can cause harm.

• Integration with EMR Systems: Hounder works heavily with Epic EMR, and Acquia makes it easier than ever to integrate must-have systems like these into a client’s web environment.

Plus, all of Acquia’s customers who aim to utilize their HIPAA-compliant technology must sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), which helps ensure that PHI is managed in strict accordance with HIPAA regulations. If your chosen solution does not include a BAA, it could expose your organization to significant compliance risks and liabilities, as there may be no formal commitment to safeguard sensitive health data. Partnering with a provider like Acquia, which offers a BAA, is a crucial step in maintaining the trust of your patients and meeting regulatory requirements.

By building web infrastructures through Acquia, our team can accelerate project timelines without sacrificing compliance. It allows us to focus on crafting tailored, patient-centered user experiences, knowing the technical foundation already meets the security expectations of modern healthcare systems.

How to Implement HIPAA-Compliant Solutions

Building a HIPAA-compliant digital platform isn’t a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process that begins at discovery and continues long after deployment. At Hounder, we integrate compliance-focused thinking into every phase of the project lifecycle, using Acquia’s platform capabilities to support and streamline that effort. Here’s how we approach HIPAA-compliant development from start to finish.

1: Establish Web Requirements and Goals

The foundation of a compliant solution starts with a deep understanding of the client’s operations and data flows. We work closely with clients to understand how data will be collected, processed, and stored, whether it’s through contact forms, patient portals, or third-party integrations.

Compliance shouldn’t and can’t be an afterthought; otherwise, it’s being implemented incorrectly. We make sure to embed security and HIPAA requirements into the technical strategy and scope of work from the very beginning, ensuring they’re accounted for in timelines, budgets, and architectural decisions.

2: Execute Web Design and Development Best Practices for HIPAA Compliance

We architect systems using Acquia’s recommended infrastructure setup, which includes network segmentation, web application firewalls, and encryption protocols. Our team minimizes data exposure and builds for compliance within our design and development techniques. This means ensuring only critical PHI is collected and designing pathways that avoid unnecessary data storage or transmission. 

When we built websites for our healthcare clients, our team ensures that data is secured and only accessible by authorized users and leveraged Acquia’s role-based permissions to have full control over that. 

If we’re implementing APIs, we also make sure to vet these third-party tools to ensure they’re compliant with HIPAA and can appropriately handle sensitive patient data. 

Our team leverages Acquia’s logging and monitoring features for auditability,  configuring audit logging on all relevant systems and utilizing Acquia’s built-in monitoring tools to track access, changes, and anomalies in real time.

3: Ongoing Maintenance and Monitoring

When we say we put relentless care into all of our projects, it’s not just our slogan, but it’s an everyday practice. One of the ways we execute this is by offering clients our support services that ensure that even after deployment, we maintain visibility into the Acquia platform to catch any issues or bugs as soon as possible.