Towards hipaa-compliant healthcare systems

In healthcare domain, there is a gap between healthcare systems and government regulations such as the Health In-surance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The violations of HIPAA not only may cause the disclosure of patients ’ sensitive information, but also can bring about tremendous economic loss and reputation damage to health-care providers. Taking effective measures to address this gap has become a critical requirement for all healthcare entities. However, the complexity of HIPAA regulations makes it dif-ficult to achieve this requirement. In this paper, we propose a framework to bridge such a critical gap between healthcare systems and HIPAA regulations. Our framework supports compliance-oriented analysis to determine whether a health-care system is complied with HIPAA regulations. We also describe our evaluation results to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach