HIPAA instance

[Katherine Lord]

We are investigating setting up a 2nd Atlassian instance that is HIPAA compliant.  I am not able to find a good description of the differences.  With turning off AI and ROVO can I still create workflows with Approvers.

Is there a comparison of regular cloud vs HIPAA compliant cloud instance?

[Lindsay Bolan]

Hi Katherine,

As far as I know, there isn't a demo or walkthrough video showing all the differences between regular & HIPAA-compliant Atlassian Cloud setups, but I can tell you what I know from having run a HIPAA-compliant org for two years.

First to answer your specific question, you will not be able to use Atlassian Intelligence or Rovo because they are not part of the HIPAA-compliant platform. This doesn't affect creating workflows with approval steps; you can still do that without Rovo.

You will need to sign a Business Associate Agreement with Atlassian, and you will need to implement the settings listed in this KB page: https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/the-hipaa-implementation-guide/

From a user experience perspective, the biggest challenge has been the "safe customer notifications" setting, because that blocks the plain text of item summary, description, and public comments from being displayed in email messages. This has caused a lot of unhappiness with my user base because most of them only interacted with IT via email threads previously.

This is just a quick rundown, but if you have any other questions, I am happy to answer.

Thanks,

Lindsay

[John Funk]

Hi Katherine,

The HIPAA compliance stuff is mainly about hiding information. When certain features are turned on, when you get an email, it has no information from the Description or Summary of the ticket - just that someone tagged you or you are now assigned to a ticket or someone left a comment, etc. You have to open the ticket to see the details. 

Here is a link to the implementation guide: 

https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/the-hipaa-implementation-guide/