The HIPAA policies and procedures you actually need
By Sam Rivera, Founder, SentinelPanda · June 17, 2026 · 1 min read · HIPAA
HIPAA does not hand you a checklist of documents. Here is the practical policy set that satisfies the Security Rule safeguards.
How the Security Rule is structured
The HIPAA Security Rule groups its requirements into three safeguard families: administrative (the largest — risk analysis, workforce training, access management, contingency planning), physical (facility access, workstation and device controls), and technical (access control, audit controls, integrity, transmission security). Your documentation set should map cleanly onto those families so an assessor can trace each safeguard to a policy.
The keystone: risk analysis
The required risk analysis is the document everything else hangs from — it identifies where electronic protected health information (ePHI) lives, the threats to it, and the safeguards in place. An out-of-date or missing risk analysis is the single most cited HIPAA enforcement finding. Refresh it on a schedule and after any material change.
The core document set
- Risk analysis and risk management plan.
- Workforce security: authorization, clearance, and termination procedures.
- Information access management and the minimum-necessary standard.
- Security awareness and training records.
- Contingency plan: data backup, disaster recovery, and emergency-mode operation.
- Audit controls, integrity, and transmission-security procedures.
- Business Associate Agreements with every vendor that touches ePHI.
Overlap with your other frameworks
HIPAA’s access management, training, contingency planning, and audit controls are the same controls you maintain for ISO 27001 or SOC 2 — described in HIPAA’s language. Adopt one policy per control, tag it to every framework it satisfies, and keep the Business Associate Agreement program as the HIPAA-specific addition.