I’m excited to announce to our healthcare customers and partners that you can now accept a single AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA) for all accounts within your organization. Once accepted, all current and future accounts created or added to your organization will immediately be covered by the BAA.
Our team is always thinking about how we can reduce manual processes related to your compliance tasks. That’s why I’ve been looking forward to the release of AWS Artifact Organization Agreements, which was designed to simplify the BAA process and improve your experience when designating AWS accounts as HIPAA accounts. Previously, if you wanted to designate several AWS accounts, you had to sign-in to each account individually to accept the BAA or email us. Now, an authorized master account user can accept the BAA once to automatically designate all existing and future member accounts in the organization as HIPAA accounts for use with protected health information (PHI). This release addresses a frequent customer request to be able to quickly designate multiple HIPAA accounts and confirm those accounts are covered under the terms of the BAA.
If you have a BAA in place already and want to leverage this new capability a master account user can accept the new AWS Organizations BAA in AWS Artifact today. To get started, your organization must use AWS Organizations to manage your accounts, and “all features” needs to be enabled. Learn more about creating an organization here.
Once you are using AWS Organizations with all features enabled, and you have the necessary user permissions, then accepting the AWS Organizations BAA takes about two minutes. We’ve created a video that shows you the process, step-by-step.
If your organization prefers to continue managing HIPAA accounts individually, you can still do that. We have streamlined the process for accepting an individual account BAA as well. It takes less than two minutes to designate a single account as a HIPAA account in AWS Artifact. You can watch the new video here to learn how.
As with all AWS Artifact features, there is no additional cost to use AWS Artifact to review, accept, and manage individual account BAAs or the new organization BAA. To learn more, go to the FAQ page.