HIPAA Compliance in AP: Why Partial Compliance Breaks Procure-to-Pay

If you work in healthcare finance, you’ve heard the pitch a hundred times: “Our platform is HIPAA compliant.”

It sounds reassuring. It checks a box. And it’s almost always misleading.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most AP and procure-to-pay solutions claim HIPAA compliance through avoidance, not architecture. Their strategy is simple: don’t let protected health information into the system in the first place.

Read the fine print and you’ll find:

• Instructions about which fields are “appropriate” for Public Health Information (PHI)
• Disclaimers pushing compliance responsibility onto your team
• Certifications that apply to a narrow slice of the platform, not your actual workflows

That’s not compliance. That’s a workaround dressed up as a solution.

How “HIPAA-Compliant” AP Platforms Push Risk Onto Finance Teams

For healthcare finance teams, this creates a daily operational tax:

Your AP staff becomes a compliance checkpoint. Every invoice gets manually reviewed before upload. Detailed invoices from medical services vendors? Someone redacts them first. Explanation of Benefits (EOBs) with procedure codes? Can’t upload the original.

You’re running two processes. One for “clean” invoices, another for anything that might contain PHI. This isn’t just inefficient, it’s risky.

Mistakes are inevitable. A tired AP clerk uploads an unredacted document. A vendor sends detailed billing that gets processed before anyone catches it. Suddenly, your “compliant” system has PHI in fields never designed to protect it.

The vendor shrugs. Their terms of service told you not to do that.

Where Partial Compliance Actually Breaks

HIPAA compliance doesn’t break at intake. It breaks inside the workflow.

In healthcare, PHI doesn’t arrive neatly labeled or confined to a single field. It shows up in invoice descriptions, attachments, and supporting documents, often after a process is already in motion.

Platforms that rely on “approved” fields or special handling force teams to make judgment calls midstream. What can be uploaded. What needs redaction. What has to be handled outside the system.

That’s not a compliant process. That’s risk management by memory.

True compliance means your workflows don’t change when PHI is present. The same invoices move forward. The same approvals apply. The same audit trail holds.

If PHI causes your process to fracture, compliance isn’t built in. Liability is.

Stampli is designed so healthcare finance teams don’t have to work around their systems to stay compliant.

What True HIPAA Compliance Looks Like

A truly HIPAA-compliant P2P solution doesn’t ask you to change how you work. It handles PHI the way your clinical systems do, with security built into every layer.

With Stampli, your team stops being compliance officers and starts being AP professionals again.

Healthcare Organizations Are Already Seeing the Difference

When your AP platform actually works with your compliance requirements instead of around them, the operational impact is immediate.

Suburban Orthopaedics eliminated the duplicate work that plagues healthcare finance teams. “We don’t have to reproduce any work,” says CFO Tim Long. “Stampli being able to seamlessly integrate within our ERP has been absolutely seamless and kind of a game changer in terms of how we are running our accounting department. We’re closing our books a lot quicker.”

The efficiency gains freed up half an FTE, redeployed to higher-value work instead of manual invoice processing. “As a CFO who doesn’t like hiring headcount, but rather just optimizing headcount, this has been kind of a game changer for our organization.”

The Pines at Davidson, a senior living community, went from “1980s accounting to 2020s” after implementing Stampli. Controller Colin Madden describes the transformation: “The ability to jump from an income statement in our ERP system, drill down to the expense line, and then click the link to go right to Stampli to see the actual source document, it’s like we’re in the future.”

The result? Reduced AP headcount, departments saving up to three hours a day on invoice administration, and an audit trail that made their audit dramatically easier. “We were able to provide our auditors with invoice printouts that show we’re actually using our internal controls,” Madden notes. “That was very helpful.”

The Bottom Line

Healthcare finance teams have accepted a false choice for too long: that compliance means compromise, that security means friction, that protecting patient information means slowing down AP.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

With Stampli, you get:

• Full HIPAA compliance across every field and workflow—not just designated “safe zones”
• Full platform functionality including AI-powered coding, automated matching, and flexible approvals
• Full audit trails that satisfy both compliance requirements and external auditors
• Zero workarounds for your team to manage

Stop working around your tools. Stop being the compliance department. Start being the finance team that moves your organization forward.