Enhancing HIPAA Compliance Audits to Prevent Large-Scale Health Data Breaches: A National Cybersecurity Imperative

Abstract

The increasing number and magnitude of healthcare data breaches in the United States require full analysis of the compliance audit mechanisms of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This piece of research examines how existing HIPAA audit programs are working to mitigate massive health information breaches and suggest improved approaches to improve national cybersecurity positioning. The proposed study presents a mixed-method research design by integrating quantitative research of breach statistics in 2016-2025 and qualitative research of audit practices to reveal the key gaps in the existing compliance systems. The researchers examined 1,847 reported breaches of healthcare data of more than 245 million people, finding that 73 percent of medical institutions with the biggest breaches had successfully completed their latest HIPAA compliance audits. The main results of the research show that the traditional audit methods are more concerned with the compliance of documentation than with the effectiveness of operation security. The study suggests an Enhanced HIPAA Audit Framework (EHAF) that includes continual observation and risk-based assessment as well as threat modeling approaches. The adoption of the EHAF is proven to have the potential to decrease the breach cases by 58 percent and the costs by 3.2 billion per year. The research paper offers a contribution to the policy of cybersecurity, as it offers evidencebased recommendations to improve the healthcare data protection by introducing enhancements to the audit mechanisms, which will ultimately lead to the privacy protection of patients as well as the security of the national healthcare infrastructure.