HIPAA compliance: What you need to know for using feature flags

HIPAA compliance for healthcare software requires protecting electronic protected health information wherever it is transmitted or used, including within feature-flagging systems that may rely on patient attributes, targeting rules, metadata, analytics events, logs, integrations, and client-side payloads. The discussion explains that a vendor’s business-associate status and the need for a business associate agreement depend on whether ePHI reaches the vendor, while self-hosting and local or remote evaluation can reduce exposure but do not eliminate the need to map all data flows. Relevant HIPAA safeguards include unique user access, authentication, audit controls, change approvals, risk analysis, activity reviews, incident response, encryption, and timely deprovisioning. It recommends minimizing sensitive targeting data through opaque cohort identifiers, avoiding clinical values in rule names or saved groups, restricting third-party analytics and webhooks, redacting logs, and maintaining records of changes and access for at least six years. The article presents GrowthBook as an example platform offering local evaluation, remote evaluation, secure attributes, audit logs, approval workflows, role-based access, SSO, SCIM, kill switches, warehouse-native analytics, and cloud or air-gapped self-hosted deployments, while emphasizing that no software is inherently HIPAA compliant without appropriate configuration and operational controls.

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