A Semantically Rich Knowledge Graph to Automate HIPAA Regulations for Cloud Health IT Services

As healthcare organizations adopt cloud-based services to manage their patient data, compliance with the rules and policies of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulation becomes increasingly complex. At present, HIPAA rules are available only in large textual format and require significant human effort to implement in the Health IT systems. Moreover, every change in the regulation, like the recent relaxation in telehealth policy due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has to be manually implemented in the IT system. We have developed a semantically rich Knowledge graph, using Semantic Web technologies to represent HIPAA rules in a machine-processable format. This will significantly help in automatically reasoning of HIPAA policies. In this paper, we describe our design along with the results of our study of the current status of research on HIPAA ontology. We have validated our design against use cases defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This knowledge graph can be integrated with existing healthcare systems to provide automated compliance with HIPAA policies.