Label Studio Enterprise Achieves HIPAA Certification

At HumanSignal, our top priority is the security and privacy of our customers' data. Today, we're proud to announce that we have achieved HIPAA compliance. Achieving this certification is an important milestone for our company and customers, as it involves implementing strict administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of PHI that is created, received, maintained, or transmitted electronically (ePHI).

Why HIPAA compliance is so important

Medical data comes in many forms, from ultrasounds to electronic health records (EHR) and audio recordings of patient consultations, and it often contains sensitive and private information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a U.S. federal law that sets strict national standards for protecting this type of information from being disclosed without a patient’s consent or knowledge.

Failure to comply with these regulations when handling medical data can have severe consequences for individuals and organizations. These consequences include everything from civil or criminal penalties to lawsuits, corrective action plans, increased audits from regulatory bodies, and more.

Why you need a HIPAA-compliant training data platform

Any organization dealing with protected health information (PHI), which encompasses most healthcare, life sciences, and medical research use cases, must ensure that required physical, network, and process security measures are in place and followed at all times. These requirements extend to the tools used to annotate and manage data for training AI models.

A HIPAA certification implies that the training data platform already has robust security measures in place to protect sensitive health information, including encryption, secure data storage, and stringent access controls. Label Studio Enterprise, for example, is not only HIPAA compliant but also SOC2 certified, which is considered the gold standard for security compliance of SaaS companies.

HIPAA compliance can also facilitate collaboration between practitioners, research, and data science teams, as many organizations in the healthcare sector require their partners to be compliant, including the tools they use. Using a HIPAA-compliant data labeling platform can make it much easier for interdisciplinary teams across institutions to work together to build more robust models - without sharing sensitive healthcare data. Label Studio Enterprise, for example, provides strict role-based and project-based access controls so these teams can work together in a single secure location while only having access to the data they need.

Furthermore, as data privacy and security concerns continue to grow, data protection regulations are likely to become even more stringent. By investing in a HIPAA-certified platform now, companies can be better prepared for future regulatory changes, especially those platforms that exceed these requirements.

How HumanSignal protects sensitive medical data

Healthcare organizations have some of the strictest requirements as far as infrastructure and protocols are concerned. To meet these needs, HumanSignal offers Label Studio Enterprise, a fully managed and secure cloud-based platform or an on-premises solution. In addition to being fully HIPAA compliant, Label Studio Enterprise also provides the following security and governance features, giving you peace of mind and reducing compliance risks associated with sharing data across health systems:

• Secure architecture. Your data is never accessed or stored on our servers. We provide seamless integration with cloud-based storage services and on-prem servers, and your data is loaded directly into the annotator browser, bypassing our servers.
  
• Secure collaboration. Internal and external subject matter experts can work securely together using role-based access controls at the organizational and project level, so you always control exactly who has access to which datasets.
  
• SSO and LDAP. Label Studio Enterprise supports single sign-on using SAML or LDAP authentication.
  
• Audit logs and reporting. The platform automatically logs all user activities, so you can both monitor and report on all the activities being performed in the application.

Achieving HIPAA compliance is another step in our mission to blend security seamlessly into development and operations workflows, and is proof that we take the unique security and compliance challenges that healthcare and medical organizations face very seriously. You can learn more about our HIPAA certification by contacting our sales team.