HealthTech Founders: SOC 2 Is Not a Substitute for HIPAA
2026-05-22 · 8 min read
Enterprise health buyers will ask for both. They overlap on access and encryption — and they diverge the moment PHI and BAAs enter the conversation.
Two regimes, one stack
SOC 2 is an attestation against criteria you choose to include. HIPAA is a regulatory obligation if you create, receive, maintain, or transmit protected health information for a covered entity. A SOC 2 report does not make you HIPAA compliant. A HIPAA program does not give procurement the SOC report they are trained to request.
Where the work is the same
Access control, encryption, audit logging, vendor diligence, and incident response show up in both. If you map those once against your real architecture, you stop writing two contradictory policies for the same S3 bucket.
Where HealthTech gets surprised
Business associate agreements, minimum necessary, breach notification clocks, and workforce training are not “extra SOC 2 points.” They are separate work. If your AI interview does not ask whether you touch PHI, it will generate a program that looks complete and fails the first hospital security review.
Want this mapped onto your stack?
Send a readiness request. A representative will get in touch to collect details — this is not the assessment itself, and not an examination or certification.