The HIPAA industry is vast. Here at Paubox, it's been surprising to see how many different types of organizations face HIPAA compliance hurdles. In our case, the market for HIPAA Compliant Email is comprised of a lot more organizations than just hospitals, dentists and nursing facilities. While there's a lot of information on Google about the size of U.S. Healthcare, I could not find a comprehensive resource for the size of the HIPAA industry. So I did the research myself. As I'd discover, there is a sizable difference between the two. The goal of this post is to comprehensively determine the size of the HIPAA industry.
Let's begin this post with some statistics on U.S. Healthcare.
When we talk about HIPAA and U.S. Healthcare however, the numbers don't match up evenly. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count Pharmaceutical or Health Insurance companies in its coverage of the Healthcare market. We of course know that both Pharma and Health Insurance must be HIPAA compliant. When I did the research, I discovered the Pharmaceutical and Health Insurance industries totaled 1.5 million employees. So far that gets us to 19.5 million American employees that must be HIPAA compliant. I then began to wonder if there were additional employment categories that didn't fall into the typical definition of healthcare, yet must be HIPAA compliant nonetheless. What followed next was a deep dive into the U.S. Labor market using the National Employment Matrix tool.
Eight hours and several hundred lines of Excel entries later, I had my answer. In 2014, 22 million Americans were required to be HIPAA compliant in the workplace. By 2022, it's forecast to climb to nearly 26 million employees. That's a 16% jump in just eight years.
The variance between the U.S. Dept. of Labor's definition of U.S. Healthcare and the actual size of the HIPAA industry is substantial. If we divide 18 million by 22 million, we get a differential of 18.2%. That's a big difference!