Compliance is an essential component to application (app) development across many industries, in particular, heathcare.
Based in San Francisco, CA, TrueVault offers a solution to make HIPAA compliance easy for healthcare applications. A privately owned, venture-backed company founded in 2013, it helps its customers securely run apps and store sensitive heath data (PHI) through its HIPAA compliant REST API. Developers of Web apps, mobile apps, and wearable developers utilize the solution to ensure that their apps are secure and HIPAA compliant.
“TrueVault secures a company’s most valuable asset—its data. We provide enterprise-grade security and HIPAA compliance that enables heathcare providers, players, and third parties serving the healthcare vertical to store and manage sensitive data and build secure and compliant apps,” says Morgan Brown, VP of growth, TrueVault. “For developers, we eliminate the headaches and red tape of compliance and make it easy for them to create and connect applications to sensitive data.”
iOS 8 SDK
In response to the launch of Apple iOS 8, which includes new health data tracking through its app, Health, and HealthKit API, TrueVault released a new software development kit (SDK) to provide iOS developers with an easy way to build HIPAA compliant healthcare apps for the new operating system.
The new iOS is expected to fuel demand for wearable and health apps as consumers look for ways to take advantage of these new features, which enables tracking functions such as sleep cycles, calories burned, and blood sugar levels. However, app developers need a way to manage this sensitive health data.
“The TrueVault SDK for iOS makes it easy for iOS developers to write and read to the TrueVault API with native objects built for Objective C and Swift. This gives developers the power to store, manage, and call personal health data functions that utilize the data in a highly secure and HIPAA compliant architecture,” explains Brown.
Additionally, data in TrueVault is available across platforms. Patients that write data to TrueVault through an iOS app can have that data viewed by healthcare providers using other operating systems.
The SDK has been in development for two months and the company continues add new features. “Out of the box, the SDK includes HIPAA compliance and data security via the TrueVault data store. We’d love to hear from the developer community about what they’d like to see in future versions, but in the meantime we continue to add features to it based on what we know to be pain points,” offers Brown.
Compliance Challenges
With TrueVault’s SDK, mobile app developers save hundreds of hours and painstaking compliance work. Additionally, it offers them the assurance that data is safe and secure. “With just a line of code, using TrueVault lets developers manage PHI in a way that meets the HIPAA Technical and Physical Safeguards requirements,” notes Brown.
TrueVault differs from other providers in a few important ways. First, Brown explains that there is no required structure or schema that needs to be followed to use it. Developers can define any schema and store any objects they want to. It also handles BLOB files, videos, and simple records—the developer decides how the API manages their data, not the other way around.
Second, TrueVault works with existing technology stacks. The app and non-sensitive data run on existing infrastructure, while sensitive PHI can be stored and managed in TrueVault. There is no need to move it all to the TrueVault service.
Brown notes that most importantly, TrueVault is the one-stack solution for data security and compliance. It is an enterprise grade data encryption and management solution. It’s HIPAA compliant, is a secure application backend, and enables cross-platform data sharing.
Applications that use TrueVault for data security and compliance can display the TrueValut HIPAA compliant badge on their Web site. The badge shows users that their data is handled in a safe and complainant manner, and lets developers stand out from the thousands of other health-related applications that consumers can choose from in app stores.
Next Steps
TrueVault is committed to building out the features requested by its enterprise customers with a focus on the tools to make developers lives easier in connecting data to patients and healthcare providers.
“We believe that data is most valuable when it is being used to improve decision-making and communication. When data is easier to access, it is more likely to be used in patient care. We’re focused on making it easier for developers to enable that data sharing in the service of improved patient outcomes,” says Brown.
As new health and fitness apps emerge to take advantage of new features offered by Apple’s iOS 8, developers can rest assured they remain compliant with the help of TrueVault’s SDK. SW
Oct2014, Software Magazine
