Is Amazon Bedrock HIPAA compliant?
Yes, if your AWS account has an executed business associate agreement and you stay off the two model families AWS carves out of Bedrock's HIPAA eligibility.
Applies to Amazon Bedrock. Last reviewed .
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What you must do
- Enter into the AWS business associate agreement before any patient information reaches Bedrock. AWS states you agree not to use HIPAA Eligible Services with protected health information without first doing so.
- Check the model you invoke against the carve-out. AWS lists the service as 'Amazon Bedrock [excluding Fable and Mythos models]', so eligibility depends on which model a request routes to, not on Bedrock itself.
- Confirm every other service in the same workload appears on the HIPAA Eligible Services Reference. Eligibility is granted service by service, not to an account.
- Keep prompts, completions and evaluation runs out of any store, log or analytics service that is not itself on that list.
- Re-check the list when you add a model or a service. AWS revises it continually: the version behind this entry was published 3 August 2026.
Does Amazon Bedrock sign a business associate agreement?
Yes. Amazon Web Services offers one. None stated. Eligibility is per service; AWS names no support-plan or tier requirement on the reference. AWS states only that a business associate agreement must be entered into before protected health information touches an eligible service. The reference does not describe the signing route: confirm it with AWS rather than assuming.
What this means in practice
Bedrock is not an assistant you log into; it is a model API you build against, and that changes where the compliance work sits. Nobody at your practice will paste a note into Bedrock. An application your developer or vendor wrote will send one, on a schedule, at volume, and the question is whether every hop that request takes is on the eligible list.
AWS grants eligibility one service at a time. A signed agreement does not make an account compliant; it makes the named services usable with patient information inside that account. The failure mode is not Bedrock: it is the queue, the log group or the analytics service sitting either side of it that nobody checked.
The model carve-out matters more than it looks. Bedrock is a routing layer over many model families, and AWS excludes two of them by name. A change to which model your application calls is a change to whether the call is eligible, and that change can be made in a config file by someone who has never read this page.
How organizations get this wrong
- Reading the eligibility row as covering all of Bedrock. AWS writes the exclusion inline, in square brackets, and it is easy to skim past.
- Assuming account-level coverage. Eligibility is per service, so the storage bucket, log group and queue around Bedrock each have to be on the list in their own right.
- Leaving prompt and completion logging on by default into a service that is not eligible, which quietly creates a second copy of everything the model saw.
- Building on a model today and swapping it for a cheaper one later without re-reading the list.
What the agreement does not cover
- The Fable and Mythos model families, which AWS names as excluded from Bedrock's HIPAA eligibility.
- Any AWS service absent from the HIPAA Eligible Services Reference, even inside an account with a signed agreement.
- What you build on top. AWS does not inspect or approve the application layer, the prompts you send or the retention you configure.
Alternatives
The comparable question for a team that wants a hosted assistant rather than a model API it has to build against
Where the organization already runs Microsoft 365 and would rather not stand up cloud infrastructure
Keep a record of your Amazon Bedrock agreement
Sources
- HIPAA Eligible Services Reference: Amazon Web Services. Published August 3, 2026. Read August 24, 2026.
Amazon Web Services can change these terms at any time. If something here no longer matches what Amazon Web Services tells you, tell us.