Although the mHealth solution market is poised to grow in the years ahead, mobile apps pose new challenges for adhering to privacy and security rules for securing Protected Health Information (PHI) covered in HIPAA and HITECH. Healthcare organizations that fail to implement the necessary safeguards as required by these laws risk exposing sensitive PHI and may also incur the high costs of non-compliance.

Kinvey is looking to tackle this problem with its newly launched HIPAA compliant enterprise mobile Backend as a Service (mBaaS) on Google Cloud Platform. The service delivers an affordable and timely solution as the demand for mobile health solutions is increasing and the U.S. Federal Government is gearing up for the next phase of HIPAA compliance audits in the second quarter of 2016.

Kinvey’s HIPAA Compliant mBaaS provides healthcare providers, payers, and pharmaceutical and life sciences companies with a secure, compliant and complete platform for all of their mobile and responsive web apps. Delivered as a fully-managed service running on Google Cloud Platform, the solution enables companies from the healthcare industry to focus on delivering their apps instead of building, managing, securing, and patching infrastructure. This, according to Kinvey, reduces IT CAPEX and OPEX costs, along with app time to market.

“With the rise of mHealth, our customers asked for a secure, HIPAA compliant service for their mobile app delivery,” Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Kinvey, said in a statement. “We looked at different clouds to host our mBaaS and chose Google Cloud Platform because the combination of their performance, security, and price was unmatched relative to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM.”

The service provides a secure, complete platform for mobile development. On the mobile client, Kinvey’s libraries encrypt all data at rest, while SSL 256 bit cipher with signed certificates are used to secure data in transit. Kinvey provides built-in and enterprise authentication services employing anonymized tokens and secure key management. The platform includes a built-in encrypted data vault and provides secure IPSEC VPN connectivity to enterprise data sources. It also includes the recently announced Kinvey Operational Intelligence, providing actionable compliance tracking and reporting.

Finally, as part of its work with customers, Kinvey will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to cover its service and underlying infrastructure.