Achieving and Maintaining Compliance in Healthcare

The healthcare industry is undergoing a rapid digital transformation, fueled by innovative technologies that promise to improve patient care, streamline operations, and reduce costs.Workspace management is the strategic organization of a company's physical and digital spaces to boost productivity, cut costs, and improve the employee experience. As the number of medical devices, IoT endpoints, and telehealth platforms grows, organizations face mounting challenges in securing sensitive patient data and maintaining regulatory compliance. Employees face challenges in managing digital experiences due to slowdowns, crashes, and disruptions that hamper productivity. HCL BigFix supports compliance management and endpoint compliance by providing centralized visibility, automated patch management, and real-time compliance reporting. With BigFix, healthcare providers can simplify HIPAA compliance, reduce vulnerabilities, and ensure their IT ecosystems remain continuously aligned with regulatory standards.

The Reality of Healthcare Data Breaches

In the first half of 2024, over 31 million Americans had their health data compromised in the ten largest data breaches. Despite an 11.87% reduction in the average cost of healthcare data breaches, now standing at $9.77 million, a significant gap persists between healthcare and other industries. HCL BigFix enables organizations to manage vulnerability management, enforce endpoint compliance, and generate accurate compliance reporting, helping mitigate the risks associated with these breaches.  These rising threats highlight the growing importance of compliance in healthcare, especially as digital ecosystems expand across hospitals, clinics, and remote care environments.

Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is not only a legal requirement but also essential for maintaining the trust of patients and avoiding costly penalties. For those organizations that contract with the US Dept of Health and Human Services, compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) is also required. This growing regulatory landscape is prompting many organizations to revisit what compliance is in healthcare and how modern tools can streamline processes.

Managing and securing all endpoints play a crucial role in ensuring HIPAA compliance and the mandate to protect personal health information (ePHI). Although HIPAA does not specify exact controls or tools, HIPAA does specify what healthcare organizations should do to protect patient data, rather than how it is accomplished. This provides the necessary flexibility for compliance for a national network of hospitals and a small family practice. This is where endpoint compliance, patch management, and vulnerability management become essential pillars of a strong healthcare security posture. 

HCL BigFix has helped healthcare providers and health plans achieve and maintain HIPAA compliance. HIPAA requirements associated with endpoint management and security include:

continuous healthcare compliance monitoring, accurate compliance reporting, and proactive remediation as part of broader risk and compliance initiatives. 

What is Healthcare Compliance?

Healthcare compliance refers to the policies, procedures, and technical measures healthcare organizations implement to ensure patient data is secure, IT systems are reliable, and operations meet federal and state regulations such as HIPAA and FISMA. Compliance management ensures organizations are audit-ready, protects sensitive health information, and reduces operational and reputational risk.

Scope of Healthcare Compliance

Healthcare compliance covers all facets of patient care IT systems, including:

1. Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
2. Medical devices and IoT endpoints
3. Network infrastructure and cloud applications
4. Endpoint devices such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices
5. Third-party vendors handling sensitive patient data

Risk Analysis and Core Requirements for Healthcare Compliance

HIPAA requires covered entities to conduct a comprehensive risk analysis to identify potential vulnerabilities, threats, and risks to ePHI. This assessment does more than satisfy regulatory requirements; it forms one of the foundational elements of compliance management and helps organizations understand what compliance in healthcare is from an operational security standpoint.

IT teams are overwhelmed by support tickets and lack the context needed to resolve issues quickly.

With HCL BigFix, covered entities can:

• Ensure that IT has visibility to all endpoints from a single management platform.
• Leverage threat information provided by CISA and MITRE to detect and report on vulnerabilities across all endpoints, including laptops, desktops, servers and mobile devices.
• Assess current compliance levels based on standards and benchmarks like CIS, PCI, DISA STIG and others.
• Ensure continuous compliance with automatic remediation and no ad hoc scanning!
• Provide near real time patch and compliance reporting.
• Ensure all installed software is licensed and unauthorized software is identified and removed.
• Monitor new IP addresses of endpoints on the network, ensuring that HCL BigFix quickly manages, updates and secures all endpoints.

These capabilities strengthen vulnerability management, improve visibility, and support both HIPAA and healthcare software compliance needs for modern healthcare organizations. 

Key Healthcare Compliance Laws and Regulations

In addition to HIPAA and FISMA, healthcare organizations must be aware of regulations such as HITECH, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requirements for patient data protection, and state-specific privacy laws like California’s CCPA. HCL BigFix enables organizations to meet these compliance requirements through automated endpoint management, vulnerability scanning, and centralized reporting. 

1. HIPAA – Protects patient data across all healthcare organizations in the US
2. FISMA – Requires federal agencies and their contractors to meet specific IT security standards
3. HITECH Act – Strengthens HIPAA enforcement and promotes electronic health record adoption

Administrative and Technical Safeguards for HIPAA Compliance

Covered entities need to implement administrative and technical safeguards to ensure security and the proper management of endpoints. These safeguards are a critical part of HIPAA compliance in healthcare, ensuring organizations can protect patient data while maintaining operational continuity.

With HCL BigFix, covered entities can:

• Detects and remediate threats identified by vulnerability scanners such as Tenable, Qualys, and Rapid7 and by threat intelligence sources such as CISA and MITRE.
• Monitor endpoints to ensure they are operating in a healthy state, for example, by verifying that antivirus and other security applications are constantly running and up to date.
• Ensure all devices on the network are configured according to the organization's security policies, and optionally quarantine non-compliant endpoints until they are in compliance.
• Create a software asset inventory to ensure that unauthorized software is identified and removed.
• Enable granular administrator rights and two-factor authentication
• Maintain visibility, control and reporting of all endpoints, including laptops, desktops, servers and mobile devices from a single console.

Disconnected systems lead to poor visibility, inefficiency, and a disjointed employee experience.

Real-World Example in Healthcare Compliance

HCL BigFix has supported hospitals and health plans in implementing robust endpoint compliance frameworks. One such instance that underscores this impact involved a multi-state healthcare provider that utilized BigFix to automate patch management across 15,000 endpoints, resulting in a 72% reduction in vulnerabilities and achieving audit readiness for HIPAA and FISMA within six months.1 Another use case involved a large telehealth provider that deployed BigFix Workspace+ to monitor remote devices, ensuring ePHI remained encrypted and all endpoints adhered to compliance policies.

See the Full Story

Want to dive deeper into how HCL BigFix strengthens healthcare compliance at scale? Read the full case study and explore real-world outcomes across leading healthcare organizations.

Strengthening Endpoint Compliance in Healthcare Environments

Covered entities must regularly assess and update their endpoint management and security practices to address emerging threats and technologies, and to comply with evolving HIPAA regulations. This continuous evaluation is essential for endpoint compliance, ensuring that devices remain secure, updated, and aligned with organizational policies.

BigFix has helped healthcare providers and health plans by delivering an integrated, comprehensive endpoint management and security solutions that help covered entities achieve and maintain HIPAA compliance, that ensures ePHI is protected. In fact, HCL announced two new offerings: HCL BigFix Workspace+, an all-in-one endpoint management and security solution for users and their devices, and HCL BigFix Enterprise+, an all-in-one endpoint management and security solution for infrastructure servers. Both include the patch, compliance, and vulnerability management capabilities that support HIPAA and FISMA compliance and protect ePHI.  These capabilities make patch management faster, more accurate, and operationally scalable for healthcare settings. The HIPAA checklist for Windows servers is now available in the Compliance module.

Consequences of Non-Compliance in Healthcare

Failure to maintain compliance can lead to data breaches, regulatory penalties, financial loss, and reputational damage. Organizations can face fines ranging from thousands to millions of dollars per violation, along with corrective action plans imposed by regulatory bodies.

Common Challenges in Healthcare Compliance

Healthcare organizations often struggle with disparate IT systems, shadow IT, insufficient monitoring, and resource constraints. Without centralized endpoint visibility, ensuring continuous compliance is extremely challenging. HCL BigFix mitigates these challenges by providing a unified management platform for visibility, remediation, and reporting.

How to Get Started with Compliance for Healthcare Organizations

Healthcare organizations can start by conducting a risk assessment, implementing endpoint compliance solutions like HCL BigFix, automating patch management, and continuously monitoring compliance status. Integration with ITSM and CMDB platforms ensures end-to-end visibility and operational efficiency.

Emerging Trends & Future Challenges in Healthcare Compliance

As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, compliance frameworks must adapt to emerging technologies and regulatory complexities. Below are the most impactful trends shaping healthcare compliance: 

1. AI & Automation Driving Compliance Outcomes

Gartner’s 2025 Compliance Trends report identifies AI risk management and automation as core priorities for compliance leaders, with organizations increasingly focusing on AI‑enabled compliance risk detection and program effectiveness improvement. 2 

This means compliance teams are moving beyond manual processes toward AI‑driven analytics and policy enforcement, enabling more proactive identification of gaps and faster remediation.

2. Growing Complexity of Regulatory Technology Ecosystems

Healthcare compliance functions must align these technologies with regulatory frameworks like HIPAA, HITECH, and state privacy laws while avoiding over‑reliance on unproven tools.

Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Legal, Risk & Compliance technologies notes the rise of Generative AI and advanced automation tools as essential, but requiring realistic planning and targeted adoption.3 

3. Third‑Party Risk and Integrated Risk Management

Gartner’s 2025 compliance priorities highlight third‑party risk management as a top concern for compliance leaders, with many organizations experiencing impacts from external dependencies. 4
Healthcare organizations must extend compliance controls to vendor ecosystems, especially cloud service providers, telehealth platforms, and data analytics partners.

Taken together, these trends indicate that compliance in healthcare will increasingly rely on predictive analytics, automated control frameworks, and integrated risk systems to keep pace with technological and regulatory change.

Strengthen Your Healthcare Compliance with Autonomous Endpoint Security

As healthcare organizations continue to modernize, the need for resilient compliance management frameworks has never been greater. From securing endpoints to ensuring continuous healthcare compliance, HCL BigFix enables healthcare providers to stay ahead of threats, reduce operational risk, and maintain strict regulatory alignment across HIPAA, FISMA, and other industry standards. With unified visibility, automated remediation, and real-time compliance reporting, BigFix empowers your teams to protect patient data with confidence.

Building Resilient Healthcare Compliance

Compliance in healthcare is a continuous, evolving process that demands visibility, automation, and governance across all IT assets. Leveraging HCL BigFix ensures that organizations can meet regulatory requirements, protect ePHI, and streamline operational workflows. With a proactive compliance framework, healthcare providers not only mitigate risk but also strengthen patient trust and organizational resilience.

Download the whitepaper, Managing and Securing Endpoints in Healthcare.

Contact us to discover how HCL BigFix can secure your healthcare endpoints and safeguard patient data.

FAQs

1. What is the meaning of health compliance?

Health compliance refers to the policies, processes, and controls that healthcare organizations must follow to protect patient data, ensure operational safety, and meet regulatory requirements such as HIPAA compliance and FISMA compliance. It includes security practices, documentation, reporting, and continuous monitoring.

2. What are the 7 elements of healthcare compliance?

The seven elements typically include: written policies and procedures, compliance leadership, effective training, monitoring and auditing, enforcement standards, corrective actions, and ongoing risk assessments. These elements help organizations maintain strong healthcare compliance frameworks.

3. What are the 5 keys of compliance?

The five keys include: risk assessment, policy enforcement, continuous monitoring, compliance reporting, and corrective action. In healthcare, these keys are essential for achieving secure endpoint compliance, ensuring systems remain protected and aligned with regulatory standards.