HIPAA vs SOC 2: do you need both?

By Sam Rivera, Founder, SentinelPanda · June 19, 2026 · 1 min read · HIPAA

HIPAA is the law; SOC 2 is the proof your customers ask for. Handling health data, you often end up doing both — and the work mostly overlaps.

Different kinds of thing

HIPAA is law — if you handle PHI as a business associate, you must comply, full stop, with no certificate involved. SOC 2 is a voluntary attestation by a CPA firm that customers ask for to gain assurance. One is an obligation; the other is a sales-and-trust artifact. They are not substitutes.

Heavy control overlap

The good news is the controls overlap enormously: access control, encryption, logging, risk assessment, incident response, training, and vendor management appear in both. A SOC 2 program covers most of what HIPAA's Security Rule requires; the HIPAA-specific additions are the BAAs, the breach rule, and PHI-scoped specifics.

Why you often need both

A health-tech vendor typically must comply with HIPAA (legally) and also wants a SOC 2 (because enterprise buyers ask for it). Many produce a SOC 2 report and a HIPAA attestation/mapping together, sometimes via a single examination that covers both. The buyer gets the report; the regulator gets the compliance.

Do the work once

Treat them as one program with two outputs: build the shared control set, then add the HIPAA-specific pieces and the SOC 2 report. SentinelPanda maps one control set across HIPAA and SOC 2 so the overlap is implemented once and credited to both.