Patient Protect Publishes Its HIPAA Foundation—Free to Use, Cite and Build On

Over fifteen free tools, open data and open-source software give independent practices a stronger starting point for HIPAA security

CHICAGO, IL, UNITED STATES, July 30, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Independent healthcare practices covered by HIPAA operate under the same federal privacy and security framework as the nation’s largest health systems, often without dedicated legal, compliance or cybersecurity teams.

For more than a decade, Patient Protect has built tools to close that gap. Today, the company made that foundation public.
The collection brings together more than 15 resources for free public use: risk assessments, workforce training, ePHI mapping, breach-cost modeling, implementation roadmaps, threat intelligence, a citable U.S. healthcare breach dataset, machine-readable references, operational templates, research and open-source PHI-detection software.

No paid subscription. No sales call. No credit card. No paywall.
These capabilities are often delivered through paid software, consulting, training and specialized assessments. Patient Protect chose to make the foundation freely available because broader access to practical security tools helps more practices act sooner—and makes healthcare safer.

A solo dental practice with 1,200 patient records is accountable under the same federal HIPAA framework as Mayo Clinic, but with only a fraction of the legal, compliance and cybersecurity resources.

HIPAA demands the same standard of protection from every covered practice. The capacity to meet that standard is profoundly unequal.
The consequences do not require a sophisticated attack. In 2016, Raleigh Orthopaedic Clinic agreed to pay $750,000 after releasing X-ray films and protected health information for approximately 17,300 patients to a vendor without a Business Associate Agreement.
No ransomware. No zero-day. A routine vendor workflow and a missing agreement.

“We did not begin by asking independent providers to trust another compliance platform,” said Alexander Perrin, founder and CEO of Patient Protect. “We began by building the tools, data and research independent practices need to make better security decisions. Independent healthcare carries enterprise-level responsibility without enterprise-level infrastructure. We chose to make that foundation public.”

Raising the Security Standard
The public collection supports six essential capabilities:
Assess risk. A unified risk assessment, readiness scan, entity-determination tool and Ask PIPAA—an AI assistant that answers HIPAA questions with citations—help organizations identify exposure and establish a starting point.

Map exposure. The ePHI Data Flow Mapper shows how patient information moves through employees, devices, vendors and systems. An implementation roadmap and secure-infrastructure checklist convert those findings into sequenced work.

Quantify consequences. Built from Patient Protect’s foundational research, The Economics of ePHI Exposure, the HIPAA Breach Cost Calculator models year-one and 10-year impact across six compounding cost domains, from remediation and regulatory exposure to insurance repricing, patient attrition and downstream fraud. The research finds that 10-year impact can exceed first-year costs by 300% to 500%.

Train the workforce. Four public modules cover the HIPAA Privacy Rule, Security Rule and compliance fundamentals, drawn from an 80-module curriculum. A 203-term glossary provides regulatory citations and cross-references.

Track the threat landscape. A public breach dashboard, HIPAA Pulse, Patient Protect Signal for iOS and a downloadable dataset provide visibility into healthcare attacks, enforcement and emerging risk.

Prevent disclosure. HIPAA Shield warns users when potential protected health information is typed or pasted into browser forms, including consumer AI interfaces. Detection occurs entirely inside the browser. The extension makes zero network requests, contains no telemetry and is live on the Chrome Web Store.

“A policy document cannot intervene when someone is about to paste patient information into the wrong system,” Perrin said. “Protection has to appear at the moment of the decision. Practices need something they can use while the risk is happening, not another document explaining what they should have done afterward.”

Built to Be Used, Cited and Extended
Several core assets carry open licenses so their value can extend beyond Patient Protect.
The Healthcare Breach Dataset and HIPAA reference toolkit are published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. The dataset combines records from the HHS Office for Civil Rights Breach Portal with OCR resolution agreements and civil money penalties. It adds Patient Protect severity scoring, is available 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. Its papers, The Economics of ePHI Exposure and The Cyber-Economic Stack, are hosted on SSRN and free to read and cite.

A Free Foundation, Continuous Protection
The public resources stand on their own. They do not expire, withhold results or convert automatically into paid subscriptions.
What they do not do is run a compliance program.

Patient Protect’s paid platform goes further, handling the continuous work of risk remediation, compliance scoring, workforce governance, vendor oversight, Business Associate Agreement tracking, training enforcement, security monitoring, audit evidence and incident-response documentation.
That work never finishes, which is why it is the product.

“Security improves when more people can participate,” Perrin said. “The free layer gives every practice a credible place to begin. Our platform supports the continuous work of reviewing, enforcing and improving that protection. When the baseline rises, healthcare becomes stronger—and patients benefit most.”
Subscriptions begin at $39 per month with no long-term contract.

Explore the complete public collection:
https://patient-protect.com/free-tools

About Patient Protect
Founded in Chicago in 2015, Patient Protect builds security-first HIPAA compliance infrastructure for independent healthcare practices.
The company was created by Alexander Perrin, a technology and growth executive with two decades of enterprise software leadership; Angie Perrin, RDH and Certified HIPAA Consultant, with more than a decade of clinical practice; and Joseph Perrin, chief technology officer and infrastructure architect, who designed the platform’s security architecture.

Patient Protect combines risk analysis, compliance management, workforce training, vendor governance, breach intelligence and continuous security controls for organizations without dedicated compliance and cybersecurity departments.

Alexander J Perrin
Patient Protect
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