Azure Maps is now HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant

Azure Maps joins several other Azure services with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance, enabling healthcare and health insurance providers to use mapping and geospatial services in even more solutions, while ensuring that protected health information (PHI) is managed appropriately.  

Below are some of the HIPAA compliant mapping and geospatial capabilities that Azure Maps supports: 

• Using maps to visualize health-related data 
• Geocode patient home or work addresses 
• Calculate travel time and distance from patient location to the nearest healthcare facilities 
• Build solutions with stricter policies requiring 3rd party services to be compliant regardless of whether PHI is involved or not 
• Create internal patient monitoring systems with location visualizations 

Azure Maps is a suite of geospatial services that enable developers and companies across every industry to build public and private intelligent location-enabled experiences, and now it is HIPAA compliant.  

HIPAA is a US law that governs the use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI). It applies to covered entities—doctors’ offices, hospitals, health insurers, and other healthcare companies—with access to PHI, as well as to business associates, such as cloud service providers, that process PHI on their behalf. The scope of HIPAA was extended with the enactment of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act that was created to stimulate the adoption of electronic health records and supporting information technology. 

To see the Azure Maps HIPAA compliance status, go to Microsoft cloud services in audit scope and download the Microsoft Azure Compliance Offerings document. 

To get started with Azure Maps, see the Azure Maps documentation and create a free Azure Maps account.