Students in PPE interacting with standardized patients and/or working with portable ultrasound machines.
With all Zoom accounts at Virginia Tech now HIPAA compliant, privacy can be ensured when dealing with sensitive or personally-identifiable data during meetings.

In 2020, when nearly all university academic and business operations shifted to online-only due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Virginia Tech launched a HIPAA-compliant instance of Zoom, which worked in parallel to the standard Zoom client, to offer additional privacy protections for services requiring complete confidentiality. 

This separate instance was vital to maintaining continuity of work during the pandemic, but in the years since, the Zoom platform has evolved to provide these additional privacy protections natively, enabling us to simplify our supported environment while still providing the same end-user coverage for HIPAA needs.

Over the course of FY 2024, IT Learning Systems worked to consolidate to a single Zoom instance, and on March 26, 2024, the pandemic-era HIPAA Zoom instance was shut down. 

Removing this extra Zoom instance allowed ITLS and the Division of IT to be more operationally efficient while maintaining this HIPAA compliant communication method. In addition, consolidating Virginia Tech on a single Zoom instance was a key step to take ahead of the Zoom Phone Migration project that was also completed in the spring of 2024. 

For users who require HIPAA-compliant Zoom meetings, Network Infrastructure and Services was able to add the Zoom Phone feature to their primary Zoom client, providing an all-in-one solution as opposed to providing a separate Zoom client just for the phone. 

Additionally, with HIPAA compliance enabled on the primary Zoom instances, users no longer have to request new HIPAA-specific accounts when onboarding new employees.