Aptible takes the hard work out of HIPAA compliance

Aptible takes the hard work out of HIPAA compliance

Aptible is a new startup that wants to make it easier and cheaper for developers to make their apps and services HIPAA compliant.

Backed by Y Combinator seed accelerator and Rock Health seed fund, the company offers what it calls a “compliance engine” which asks users a list of questions in plain English, and translates the answers into the appropriate format that would satisfy HIPAA regulatory authorities. On the other side, Aptible also works as a deployment platform and manages all of the necessary secure backend infrastructure needed to run HIPAA-compliant technology apps. Said platform is framework and language agnostic, allowing companies to use any programming languages and database they want.

The service costs $3,499 per month for an annual contract, which is much less than companies typically spend on HIPAA consultants and developers.“A lot of times when technology companies want to be HIPAA compliant, they’re forced to use certain kinds of tools,” said Aptible co-founder and CEO Chas Ballew. “We let you use the languages open source databases that everybody in tech uses, like PHP and MongoDB. If you want to migrate on or off Aptible, you don’t have to learn the language or API that was invented just for HIPAA compliance. We do it all for you.”

The service costs $3,499 per month for an annual contract, which according to Ballew, is much less than companies typically spend on HIPAA consultants and developers. Add in the time needed to make and keep the HIPAA compliance in place, and you get the idea why Aptible charge that much. They claim that it can have a company well on the road to HIPAA compliance in an afternoon.

Ballew adds that unlike HIPAA consultants who deal with various types of businesses, Aptible is “laser focused” on cloud-based, software-as-a-service technology companies. “We want to help the smart people who are technically good and motivated to work in healthcare to not just say, ‘Wow, I’m going to go work on something else, because it’s too much of a nightmare to do this kind of regulatory stuff.’ We can solve that problem,” he said.

Aptible has been running customers in production since late March; it is a brainchild of Ballew, a lawyer with a background in government regulatory compliance; and CTO Frank Macreery, a software engineer with a specialty in backend infrastructure. Currently it has three full-time employees.

[Via: TechCrunch]