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Healthcare providers, health systems, and digital health companies get counsel on HIPAA and data privacy, technology contracts, and the IP and regulatory questions that come with delivering care through modern technology.

Healthcare keeps absorbing new technology while its regulatory load only grows, and the two pressures rarely move in sync. MC Law advises providers, health systems, and digital health companies on data privacy, technology transactions, and the intellectual property tied to how care actually gets delivered. Our attorneys came out of software engineering, so when your platform handles protected health information, we understand the systems moving that data, not just the rules around it.

HIPAA and Health Data Privacy

Patient data is among the most regulated information you can hold. We build HIPAA compliance programs, draft business associate agreements, and prepare breach response and notification plans before you ever need them. We also track the growing patchwork of state health privacy laws and advise on research data use, so the way you collect, store, and share information holds up to scrutiny. The aim is privacy practices that protect patients and survive an audit.

Digital Health and Telemedicine

Technology is changing where and how care happens. We counsel on telemedicine programs, remote patient monitoring, patient engagement platforms, clinical decision support, and digital therapeutics, each of which raises its own mix of regulatory, privacy, and liability questions. We help you design these offerings to satisfy the rules that apply across the jurisdictions you serve, so you can deploy new care models without inheriting compliance problems you did not anticipate.

Technology Contracts and IP

Modern healthcare runs on software, devices, and vendor relationships, and every one of them rides on a contract. We negotiate technology licensing, vendor, and integration agreements, and we protect the IP behind proprietary tools, algorithms, and clinical workflows. We also advise on data ownership and use rights, so when you build or buy a platform, you know exactly what you control. The result is deals that protect both your operations and your innovations.

Frequently asked questions

HIPAA applies to covered entities like providers and health plans, and to business associates, which are vendors that handle protected health information on their behalf. If your software stores, transmits, or processes PHI for a provider, you are almost certainly a business associate and need a Business Associate Agreement in place before going live. Note that not all health data is HIPAA-regulated; a direct-to-consumer wellness app may instead fall under FTC rules and state privacy laws, so the threshold question is who you serve and what data flows where.

A BAA must set out permitted uses of PHI, require safeguards consistent with the HIPAA Security Rule, and obligate the vendor to report breaches and to flow the same terms down to its own subcontractors. Push for clear breach-notification timelines, audit rights, and obligations to return or destroy PHI when the relationship ends. Remember that a signed BAA does not, by itself, make a system compliant; you still need the actual technical and administrative safeguards behind it.

It is negotiable and worth settling up front, especially for data used to train models. Decide who owns the de-identified datasets, who owns improvements to your algorithm trained on the health system's data, and what each side can do after the contract ends. Health systems increasingly want to retain control over their patient data and a share of value from anything built on it, so silence in the contract tends to favor whoever has more leverage later.

Once software influences diagnosis or treatment, it may be regulated by the FDA as Software as a Medical Device, which can require clearance depending on risk and how much the clinician can independently review the recommendation. Clinical-decision-support tools have a specific carve-out, but it is narrow, so the design choices you make about transparency and clinician oversight directly affect whether you need FDA review. Getting this classification right early avoids building a product you later cannot legally ship.

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