Healthcare MVPs that do not fail their first compliance review.
HIPAA from week one. Audit logs designed in, not bolted on. We have shipped digital health in the US, UK, and GCC.
Why most healthcare MVPs need a rebuild before month six.
Healthcare startups die on three things: a compliance miss that requires a re-architecture, a UX that does not fit clinical workflow, and an integration with a payer or EHR that takes six months longer than the deck said. We have shipped through all three. The MVP that ships in eight weeks and the MVP that gets pulled offline in week 12 are usually different decisions made before the first PR.
What changes when a Metafic pod is in your repo.
HIPAA-eligible cloud from the start
AWS or GCP with the BAA in place before the first patient touches the system. Encrypted at rest, encrypted in transit, no shortcuts.
Audit logs as a first-class data model
Not a "we will add it later" thing. Every access is recorded with actor, action, target, and timestamp from week one.
Role-based access from day one
We do not ship a single-role MVP that gets retrofitted. Patients, clinicians, admins, and read-only roles exist from the first model.
PHI scoping at the query layer
The default for any query is "this user can only see this". Bypass requires a code review on the bypass itself.
FHIR and HL7 v2 readiness even if not used at launch
Cost to add later is many times the cost of designing for it. We design for it.
Who is on the pod for this work.
Pods scale up from here for Enterprise engagements.
Has shipped HIPAA-eligible products in production. Knows what counts as PHI and what does not.
Familiar with PHI/PII boundaries and the patterns that keep both out of logs.
Builds audit-log and compliance-spec tests alongside dev. Tests bypass paths as carefully as happy paths.
For AWS HIPAA reference architecture or the equivalent on your cloud.
The bugs that bite this stack.
Logging PHI to Sentry or Datadog accidentally
The most common compliance miss we see. We add a redaction layer in week one.
Cookies that follow users across patient sessions on shared devices
Common on iPad-based clinical workflows. Sessions need to be explicit and short.
Time zones in EHR integrations breaking medication schedules
A real category of bug. Times must be UTC end-to-end with display layer doing the translation.
Forms capturing more data than your privacy policy covers
Engineering and policy drift apart fast. We track form fields against the privacy policy.
Honest about scope.
We will not take a healthcare engagement where the legal counsel has not been engaged yet. We are engineers, not your HIPAA compliance officer. The bar to ship is one your counsel signs.
Common questions.
Are you HIPAA-compliant?
Metafic is BAA-eligible as a business associate for clients on Enterprise tier. We sign BAAs. We have shipped under several.
Do you handle FDA / SaMD compliance?
Up to a point. For Class II+ devices, we work with your regulatory team, not in place of them.
Can you integrate with Epic or Cerner?
Yes via Epic on FHIR or HL7 v2. Timelines vary by the hospital IT team, not by ours.
Do you do EU work?
Yes. We have shipped UK and EU healthcare clients with data-residency and GDPR requirements.
Ready to scope it?
A 25-minute call. We will tell you what we would do, what we would not, and whether a pod is the right shape.
Or stay in the loop. One engineering teardown a week.