Exploring Current Practices and Challenges of HIPAA Compliance in Software Engineering: Scoping Review

Abstract

Healthcare systems and applications are increasingly used to improve patient care. However, these applications face data security, privacy, and regulatory compliance challenges. The health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA) regulates the use and disclosure of patient health information. Ensuring HIPAA compliance in the software engineering process poses critical challenges to software engineering practitioners. This review focuses on understanding the state-of-the-art in the current literature for ensuring HIPAA compliance in the software development life cycle, namely, requirement gathering, software design, implementation, software testing, and evolution. The findings of this study shed light on software engineers in creating HIPAA compliance healthcare systems and applications. This literature review presents the key themes and trends in this research area. Also, it provides recommendations for future research in the intersection of software engineering methods and HIPAA compliance.