The Healthcare Compliance Step-By-Step Podcast · EPICompliance

#123 - HIPAA 2026: The Practical Roadmap for Compliance Leaders

·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

Delgado says insurers denied claims even after the clinic used their own keywords and templates.

1. The Healthcare Compliance Step-By-Step Podcast episode focuses on HIPAA 2026 changes, healthcare operations, and AI-driven compliance issues. 2. Ray Walters hosts Dr. Jose Delgado, CEO of EpiCompliance, and Delgado describes himself as former Air Force, with 30-plus years in healthcare and experience as an ex-Medicare auditor. 3. The episode asks what healthcare leaders should do now about employees, marketing, insurance denials, and AI tools. 4. Delgado says employees are healthcare’s most important resource, even as computers and AI improve diagnosis and data review. 5. He contrasts digital tools with face-to-face care by saying patients still want to see “the doctor” and that clinicians notice how a patient smells, walks, and sits. 6. He recalls an AT&T demonstration in Alaska where devices could transmit vital signs such as oxygen and pulse. 7. Delgado says the front office, nurses, doctor, and checkout staff all affect whether the patient experience works smoothly. 8. He gives a dental-office example where front-office treatment was so poor that he stopped going there. 9. He describes a receptionist who asked to cut her hours from 32 to 24 while asking for higher pay, and he uses that as a caution about expectations. 10. He uses a Christmas-party example in which a doctor told a new MA she looked very nice and should dress like that every day, and the MA filed a sexual-harassment complaint. 11. Delgado says the issue was not intent but how the words were received, and he says that distinction matters in healthcare offices. 12. He says “hostile work environment” has become a key phrase in employment disputes and gives an example of an MA reporting a doctor after being told to clean her workstation. 13. He recommends arbitration clauses in employee contracts because, in his view, jury trials make hostile-work-environment cases hard to defend. 14. Delgado says managers need to justify remediation actions clearly, because an unexplained transfer or discipline decision can be treated as retaliation. 15. He emphasizes onboarding, training, signed acknowledgments, reporting systems, and incident documentation to prove that the organization recognized a problem and acted. 16. He mentions an incident-event reporting application and corrective action plans as tools that create the documentation needed in legal and audit settings. 17. The episode shifts to marketing, where Delgado says practices can no longer rely on newspapers or telephone-book ads. 18. He says many practices still lack a website, even though HIPAA requires one, and he notes that his own site was rebuilt with multiple AIs in hours instead of paying $4,000 to $30,000. 19. The conversation has a practical, advisory tone with examples, interruptions, and real-time back-and-forth between Walters and Delgado. 20. Healthcare practice owners, compliance leaders, and billing managers will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a light overview of HIPAA basics may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical HIPAA session focused on turning policy updates into usable action.

HIPAA compliance is treated as something practices have to put into motion, not just keep on paper. Ray Walters and Dr. Jose Delgado walk through the 2026 updates, the business associate agreement changes, the notice of privacy practices revisions, and a light pass at the AI…

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Need HIPAA 2026 guidance that connects policy updates to real-world visibility?

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