Blog Post

HIPAA Compliance Training Requirements: Full Guide for Healthcare Providers

May 2025

HIPAA training is foundational for healthcare compliance – yet 13% of healthcare organizations don’t offer employees specific HIPAA training.¹ And most of those that do offer such training do so in an ad-hoc manner that limits efficacy and leaves a clear gap in their compliance posture.

This article explores why HIPAA training is important and how you can build a more robust program. From a deeper understanding of what is required in training to best practices to scale your program across the entire organization, readers will gain a complete overview of HIPAA training to ensure their patients, reputations, and bottom lines are safe.

HIPAA Compliance Training: An Overview

Defining HIPAA Training vs. HIPAA Compliance Training

While the two terms are often used interchangeably, there are important differences:

HIPAA Training takes a holistic approach, helping employees understand HIPAA regulations and their implications. It offers high level education on legal requirements, privacy standards, and the broader framework. Employees may learn about aspects of HIPAA that don’t directly relate to their role and therefore gain a deeper understanding of the role HIPAA plays across the organization and industry.
HIPAA Compliance Training zeroes in on the application—tailoring knowledge to specific job roles to ensure employees can effectively follow policies and procedures necessary for HIPAA compliance. This may be more time and cost-effective as it focuses solely on the aspects of HIPAA that are directly applicable to each employee.

Both are essential for compliance, and HIPAA compliance training is often included in broader HIPAA training.

Who Needs HIPAA Training?

HIPAA training is a general requirement for all staff working at companies that are subject to HIPAA regulations. This applies to any organization that comes into contact with any form of protected health information (PHI) – meaning health information which could be linked to a specific individual.

This covers two broad categories:

1. Covered Entities

Covered entities are the most visible custodians of PHI and can be broken down into:

Healthcare Providers: Including hospitals, nursing homes, and pharmacies that create, store, access, or transmit information about their patients.
Health Plans: These are individual or group plans that provide or pay the cost of medical care. This category includes health insurance companies, HMOs, company health plans, and certain government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Healthcare Clearinghouses: Entities that process non-standard health information they receive from another entity into a standard (such as standard electronic format or data content) or vice versa.

2. Business Associates

Business associates (BAs) include any person or organization, other than a member of a covered entity’s workforce, that performs certain functions or activities on behalf of, or provides certain services to, a covered entity that involve the use or disclosure of PHI. Examples include third-party administrators, billing companies, lawyers, accountants, IT service providers, and cloud storage providers who have access to PHI.

While all covered entities and business associates should offer some form of HIPAA training, the extent and frequency of training will vary. Most employees at law and accountancy firms are unlikely to handle PHI and may require limited training, while doctors and hospital administrators should undertake regular training as they interact with PHI every day. However, all organizations that handle PHI should offer updated training when the rules are changes or expanded.

Consequence of Non-Compliance

There is a good reason the average covered entity spends up to $120,000 each year on HIPAA compliance² – because violations are extremely costly. There are clear ethical reasons to protect patient data, but there are also serious risks for individual organizations:

Financial Penalties: A single HIPAA violation can cost upwards of $2 million in fines from the civil monetary penalties.³ This is exacerbated by the threat of legal action from affected individuals, with 2023 seeing 12 separate cases amassing nearly $50 million in settlement fees.⁴
Legal Penalties: Serious and intentional violations of HIPAA can be referred to the Department of Justice. This can lead individual employees to receive up to $250,000 in fines, and some cases have ended in up to 10 years of jail time.⁵
Reputation Damage: HIPAA violations are highly public, with offending institutions often reported on by the media and being included on the HHS’s “Wall of Shame.” This has a significant impact on patient and employee perception, and many organizations struggle to recover from severe violations.

All this makes clear the immense value of regular, comprehensive HIPAA training. But what exactly should your training program cover?

Understanding HIPAA Training Requirements

HIPAA training can be broken down into three separate groups – based on the HIPAA Rules. This helps to clarify the full scope of skills and knowledge required to ensure full compliance:

The Privacy Rule

The HIPAA Privacy Rule establishes national standards to protect individuals’ medical records and other PHI, granting patients rights over their health data – including the ability to examine, obtain, and correct their health records. It applies to most health plans, healthcare clearinghouses, and providers – as well as many business associates, depending on the specific services they offer.

HIPAA training must cover all of these standards and ensure employees understand the safeguards required to protect patient information. For example, staff should be taught clear protocols to obtain and document patient consent before disclosing PHI.

The Security Rule

The Security Rule sets standards for safeguarding electronic PHI (ePHI). It establishes official administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and security of health information. These are applicable to any organization that shares, receives, or stores ePHI.

HIPAA training must, therefore, ensure employees understand how to handle ePHI, including how to access data with proper authorization and how to dispose of data. This extends across a wide range of practices, including the use of social media – as well as cybersecurity training to identify and avoid phishing attempts or malware that could jeopardize data security.

The Breach Notification Rule

The Breach Notification Rule requires covered entities and business associates to provide notification following a breach of unsecured PHI, ensuring timely communication to affected individuals, the Department of Health and Human Services, and sometimes the media. The specific timeframe is determined by the size of the breach, with organizations given just 60 days to report a breach of 500 or more patients’ data.⁶

HIPAA training must cover key protocols to detect and report any unauthorized access to PHI, ensuring transparency and accountability. It emphasizes the importance of timely communication with affected individuals and authorities, underscoring legal obligations and risk mitigation strategies. By having a well-defined breach response plan and trained personnel, organizations can minimize the impact of data breaches, maintaining trust and compliance with regulatory standards.

How Often Is HIPAA Training Required?

HIPAA does not establish an official required frequency, but most industry experts suggest there should be:

Initial Training Upon Hiring: New hires should be immersed in HIPAA protocols promptly.
Annual Refresher Training: This keeps everyone up to date with evolving regulations and cyber threats.
Additional Training for Policy/Regulatory Updates: Further support will be necessary when significant policy changes or new threats arise.

However, frequent training is not enough – it must be comprehensive and effective.

Best Practices for HIPAA Training

Our experts have decades of combined experience managing and administering HIPAA training – and they have identified four key factors that many organizations miss:

Role-Specific Training: Many employees struggle to anchor training around their actual experience or apply it to their daily workflow. This is usually because training is too general and covers abstract scenarios. We suggest you tailor training based on specific job functions to both increase comprehension and ensure it translates into increased compliance.
Interactive Learning Methods: Training is often seen as a tick-box exercise – especially for employees who have already taken a course in HIPAA compliance during their onboarding. However, you can improve engagement using more interactive elements, such as quizzes and case studies, which bring to life the relevance of HIPAA and showcase how it actually impacts patient safety.
Documenting Training Sessions: HIPAA training is a crucial aspect of compliance and should be carefully documented. This makes future compliance audits easier and saves you from scrambling around for proof that training was undertaken.
Flexible Delivery: The healthcare workforce is increasingly fragmented, with many individuals working remotely and often missing out on training. We suggest you adapt to this situation by implementing both in-person and remote training rather than forcing remote individuals to travel for training – which is likely to turn it into a frustrating exercise.

Simplify HIPAA Compliance with Compliance Resource Center

Each of these factors is covered within our HIPAA training services. With custom materials developed for individual partners to a flexible model that enables in-person, remote, and hybrid training, we take the stress out of HIPAA training– and ensure every employee knows exactly what is required for compliance.

For tailored compliance solutions, consult with Compliance Resource Center.

Resources:

Subscribe to blog