What is HIPPA
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a federal regulation developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Atlassian Platform HIPPA support
Atlassian provides comprehensive privacy and security protections that enable customers to operate Atlassian products in compliance with HIPAA.
In the https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/understand-hipaa-compliance-for-atlassian-products/ page. There you will find about how you sign a Atlassian Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Atlassian and how you would configure the Atlassian Products to safeguard data that Atlassian hold.
Marketplace Apps HIPPA support
Marketplace apps are not in scope for the Atlassian signed BAA. Our cloud app JEMHC has no concept of HIPPA data and categorizations that you make on the Atlassian Product, we don’t extract/store data ourselves, the bare minimum information is stored (i.e. email addresses/personal names) for inbound/outbound auditing purposes. JEMHC is a tool, you can use it to extract data from the ‘source’ email content and store in your Jira instance in those pre-defined HIPPA fields.
The https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/the-hipaa-implementation-guide/ page states that:
All third-party apps integrated with Atlassian products also need to be operated in a HIPAA-compliant way. This means you must have a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with all relevant third-party apps.
As we see it, enabling HIPPA is done at the Atlassian Product (Jira/Confluence) level in order to apply “protection” to specific typed/identified/tagged data holding entities like Jira Custom Fields, limiting search and (I we expect) remote access from apps like JEMHC.
Our HIPPA compliance
As yet we have no specific HIPPA compliance. We are currently on a SOC2 compliance journey, do not have capacity for HIPPA compliance as well.
HIPPA Impact for Enterprise Mail Handler for Jira Cloud
Being HIPPA certified has challenges for us as an Email processor /sender, we need PHI (Email Addresses) for core functionality. We don’t specifically ‘know’ what data you store, so can’t specifically ‘redact’. We are not HIPPA certified at this point. The following would be seen as the ‘technical measures’ our app has that could be applied for HIPPA compliance.
The JSM notification templates we use include a limited subset of fields that notifications include, so overall JEMHC measures in place that support HIPPA could be viewed as:
We limit what field we send in notifications (not all changed fields would be sent), you can add more fields specifically.
You can enable/disable inline images and attachments to be sent (at all)
You can enable/disable email-user support (that stores email addresses in custom fields where no portal user / Jira user is desired), Email Addresses are PHI, are a HIPPA data category, for HIPPA compliance, you’d probably have to not use this feature
You can enable/disable attachment of the raw Email to the issue, again for HIPPA compliance you’d probably have to not use this feature.
If an inbound mail is not processed, a ‘fwd’ mail is sent to the Profile > Forward Users, linking to the Audit record involved. If you have disabled auditing the full mail is attached to avoid data loss. The full mail obviously contains IP addresses, recipient addresses, full content etc.
If you flag a mail for support in auditing, an issue is created in our support system referring the audit record. Only such flagged mails (its processing Report, your Profile) are available to all our support staff via a back-office app, through which data downloads can occur, such data is burned when support tickets are closed out.
Edge Cases
Webhook containing data about issue events (that drive JEMHC notifications) are kept for a short time, but still are available to System administrators, can be ‘saved’ as Preview Contexts for Template Set previews.
Auditing retains copies of Inbound and Outbound mail for 30days, this is available to System administrators. You can opt-out of auditing but make it hard for you to diagnose processing problems, and will prevent you from performing simple recovery actions (e.g. Jira user not allowed to comment) and will impact our ability to help with problems you may encounter.
Support
For HIPPA compliance, for support purposes, you would need to ensure we don’t get PHI data. It means the onus is on you to re-create emails to demonstrate problems. The impact of the following will be that our ability to deliver great support will be hindered, a cost of HIPPA compliance.
NOT send us an email containing PHI
NOT attach an email containing PHI to a support case
NOT use the “Flag for support” feature at all, to prevent any all PHI data from being exposed to use in support.
NOT send/attach the REPORT from processing a real email, as this may contain PHI.
Further Reading
Business Associate Agreement
BAA’s require legal oversight, we do not have one at this time.
Further Information
If you need more, feel free to log a support ticket with us: