Nextcloud is currently used to diagnose COVID-19 cases in Brazil, as recently noted by the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). To support the global fight against COVID-19, Nextcloud has announced that the upcoming release will feature additional HIPAA compliance capabilities.

Nextcloud said it has accelerated the development of a number of security features important in medical settings. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires applications to implement a series of security features.

Nextcloud 19 will support several new capabilities and introduce a compliance app providing an overview of the current compliance status. This will facilitate deployment of Nextcloud in HIPAA compliant settings.

Several dozen Nextcloud customers in the medical sector have deployed Nextcloud over the last few years. This includes a Ministry of Health in the middle east, more than a dozen medical institutes and hospitals in European countries as well as many the US, UK and Australia. There is also a number of regional Red Cross organizations and several international research organizations active in disease modeling and cancer research.

Improved HIPAA compliance in Nextcloud 19 is offered by the introduction of automatic logout, password reuse limitations, automatic account locking in response to failed login attempts and password expiration features. The current compliance status will be visualized in a compliance app.