Patient Protect vs Accountable HQ vs Compliancy Group (2026)

Quick answer

These are three different answers to the same question, at three different price points. Patient Protect is the budget self-serve option, listed at $39 to $99 a month for independent practices. Accountable HQ is a fuller self-serve platform, starting at $169 a month billed annually, with higher tiers adding monitoring and vendor tools. Compliancy Group is the guided program: its software comes with assigned compliance coaches, pricing is quote-only, and reported costs run roughly $3,000 and up per year. All three give you policies, training, and tracking. None of the three performs the Risk Analysis OCR asks for first. Pick based on how much hand-holding you want, and plan for the analysis separately.

Practice owners ask me about these three by name more than any others, usually framed as “which one makes me compliant?” That framing is the trap. Here is what each actually is, what each costs, and the question that actually decides it.

What are you actually comparing?

Not three versions of the same product. Three different models.

Patient Protect is self-serve software priced for independent practices. Its published pricing runs $39 to $99 a month, no contracts, and its pitch is speed: the platform says it satisfies a couple dozen HIPAA documentation requirements automatically at signup and walks you through the rest with structured workflows, BAA tracking, and compliance scoring.

Accountable HQ is also self-serve, but a bigger platform. Its published pricing starts at $169 a month billed annually for the basic HIPAA tier, with training included, and higher tiers add monitoring, vendor discovery, and hands-on support. Think of it as the step up for a practice or health-tech company with more vendors, more staff, and more moving parts.

Compliancy Group is the different animal: software plus people. Its platform, The Guard, comes with assigned compliance coaches who guide you through implementation on a schedule. It does not publish pricing; you request a quote, and reported figures from buyer-review sites like TrustRadius put typical costs at roughly $300-plus a month or $3,000-plus a year, scaling with organization size and training seats.

What do all three have in common?

The core deliverables are the same: policy and procedure templates, workforce training modules with attestation tracking, business associate agreement management, incident documentation, and a self-assessment workflow that produces a score or gap list. For keeping a compliance program organized year over year, any of the three does the job, and that job is real. Documentation that lives in one system beats documentation scattered across a shared drive, every time.

The differences that matter in practice: price (roughly $470 a year at Patient Protect’s floor versus $2,000 at Accountable’s versus $3,000-plus reported at Compliancy Group), contract structure (month-to-month versus annual), and whether a human is assigned to push you through the work. That last one is worth being honest with yourself about. Software you do not log into is an expense, not a program, and Compliancy Group’s coaching model exists precisely because most busy practices stall without an appointment on the calendar.

What does none of them do?

The thing OCR asks for first. The Security Rule requires an accurate, thorough, organization-wide risk analysis under 45 CFR 164.308(a)(1)(ii)(A), covering everywhere ePHI lives and what could compromise it. A software questionnaire that produces a green score is an input to that analysis, not the analysis. OCR has been explicit that a checklist is not a risk analysis, and the government’s own free SRA Tool carries a disclaimer that using it neither is required by nor guarantees compliance with the Security Rule.

The enforcement record shows where that gap leads. Inadequate risk analysis appears in roughly 90% of OCR’s Security Rule enforcement actions, and 2026 penalties run from $145 to $2,190,294 per violation under Federal Register 2026-01688. Several practices in those actions had compliance software in place when the violation occurred. The subscription organized their documents. It did not perform their analysis. We covered the pattern in detail in what a $39-a-month HIPAA tool gets you and the seven gaps every software buyer should audit.

So which one should you buy?

Decide on one axis: how much human push do you need?

Choose Patient Protect if you are a solo or very small practice, you will actually do the work yourself, and you want the lowest monthly cost with no contract. It is the most affordable way to keep policies, training, and BAAs organized.

Choose Accountable HQ if you have a growing team or a health-tech product, more vendors than you can track in your head, and you want a deeper platform while staying self-serve. The jump from $39 to $169 a month buys breadth.

Choose Compliancy Group if you know yourself, and what you know is that nobody in the practice will drive this without an assigned coach and a schedule. You will pay several times more for the accountability, and for some practices that accountability is the difference between a program and a shelf ornament.

And in all three cases, treat the Risk Analysis as a separate line item. The structure that works for most small practices: a consultant performs and documents the organization-wide Risk Analysis once, at a flat fee, and the cheapest software tier that fits maintains everything around it year over year. That combination costs less than the top software tier alone, and it produces the one document the software cannot.

What to do next

If you already own one of these tools, do not cancel it. Open it and check one thing: does your account contain an accurate, thorough, written risk analysis covering every system that touches patient data, or does it contain a completed questionnaire? If it is the questionnaire, that is the gap to close first. That work is our HIPAA Risk Analysis service, flat fee, three weeks, built against the methodology OCR recognizes. Not sure where you stand overall? The $750 Privacy Exposure Review gives you your top three risks in 48 hours, software gaps included.

Buy the software that matches your discipline. Hire the analysis the law actually asks for.

Last Updated: July 6, 2026