Patient Protect opens its HIPAA toolset for free public use

Patient Protect has made more than 15 HIPAA security, training and breach-intelligence tools free to use, cite and extend for independent healthcare practices. The Chicago company says the move gives smaller providers a stronger starting point for compliance without requiring a paid subscription.

Why it matters: - Independent healthcare practices face the same HIPAA privacy and security requirements as large health systems, but usually without dedicated legal, compliance or cybersecurity staff. - Patient Protect’s free public collection lowers the barrier to practical HIPAA security tools for smaller providers. - The company is trying to help practices act earlier on risk, exposure and breach prevention.

What happened: - Patient Protect published more than 15 free resources for public use, including risk assessments, workforce training, ePHI mapping, breach-cost modeling, implementation roadmaps, threat intelligence, a U.S. healthcare breach dataset, operational templates, research and open-source PHI-detection software. - The collection is free with no subscription, sales call, credit card or paywall. - The company also posted the complete public collection at Explore the complete public collection. - Founder and CEO Alexander Perrin said Patient Protect built the tools, data and research independent practices need to make better security decisions.

The details: - The public collection supports six core functions: assess risk, map exposure, quantify consequences, train the workforce, track the threat landscape and prevent disclosure. - The risk tools include a unified risk assessment, readiness scan, entity-determination tool and Ask PIPAA, an AI assistant that answers HIPAA questions with citations. - The ePHI Data Flow Mapper tracks how patient information moves through employees, devices, vendors and systems. - An implementation roadmap and secure-infrastructure checklist turn that mapping into sequenced work. - The HIPAA Breach Cost Calculator models year-one and 10-year impact across six cost domains, including remediation, regulatory exposure, insurance repricing, patient attrition and downstream fraud. - Patient Protect’s research says 10-year impact can exceed first-year costs by 300% to 500%. - Four public training modules cover the HIPAA Privacy Rule, Security Rule and compliance fundamentals. - A 203-term glossary adds regulatory citations and cross-references. - HIPAA Pulse, Patient Protect Signal for iOS and a downloadable dataset provide visibility into healthcare attacks, enforcement and emerging risk. - HIPAA Shield warns users when potential protected health information is typed or pasted into browser forms, including consumer AI interfaces. - HIPAA Shield runs entirely inside the browser, makes zero network requests, contains no telemetry and is live on the Chrome Web Store.

Between the lines: - The release frames HIPAA compliance as a resource problem as much as a policy problem. - Patient Protect is positioning free tools as the on-ramp and its paid platform as the ongoing operating layer. - The company is also using open licensing to let outside users cite, reuse and build on part of the stack. - The Healthcare Breach Dataset and HIPAA reference toolkit are published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. - The dataset combines HHS Office for Civil Rights Breach Portal records with OCR resolution agreements and civil money penalties. - The dataset adds Patient Protect severity scoring, comes in CSV and JSON, uses Schema.org Dataset cataloging and excludes AI-modeled projections. - The toolkit includes 203 HIPAA terms, more than 40 acronyms, the 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers and state breach-notification requirements. - HIPAA Shield is published under the MIT license. - Four operational templates are available for unrestricted use. - The Secure Care Research Institute publishes the methodology behind Patient Protect’s breach-economic and threat-intelligence work, with papers hosted on SSRN and free to read and cite.

What's next: - The free resources will remain available without expiration or automatic conversion into paid subscriptions. - Patient Protect’s paid platform continues to handle risk remediation, compliance scoring, workforce governance, vendor oversight, Business Associate Agreement tracking, training enforcement, security monitoring, audit evidence and incident-response documentation. - Subscriptions start at $39 per month with no long-term contract. - Patient Protect says the free layer is meant to raise the baseline while the paid platform manages continuous compliance work.

The bottom line: - Patient Protect is trying to turn HIPAA security from a gated service into a public toolkit, then sell the ongoing management layer to practices that need continuous support.