A practical HIPAA architecture for mobile health apps

Treat PHI as a boundary, not a field

The teams that struggle with HIPAA are the ones that scatter protected data across analytics payloads, crash logs and third-party SDKs. The fix is architectural: one server boundary owns PHI, and nothing else is allowed to see it.

• Encrypted at rest and in transit, with keys rotated on a schedule you can evidence
• Row-level authorization enforced in the database, not the client
• Audit trails on every read, not just every write
• Redacted telemetry — crash reports never carry identifiers

Sign the paperwork that matters

Business associate agreements with every vendor that touches the boundary. If a vendor will not sign one, they sit outside the boundary or they do not ship.

Make the audit boring

The goal of the architecture is that an auditor's questions have short answers backed by logs. That is the difference between a two-week scramble and an afternoon.