Healthtech companies sit on a specific kind of pressure. You are holding protected health information, often payment data too, and you are selling into an industry where a single breach disclosure can end a partnership before it starts. Hospital systems, insurers, and health networks now ask vendors for proof of security before they will even schedule a demo. That proof usually starts with a penetration test.
Penetration testing for healthtech is not the same exercise as testing a generic SaaS app. The stakes are different, the regulatory backdrop is different, and the systems under test are usually messier: patient portals, HL7 or FHIR integrations, third-party lab and pharmacy APIs, legacy EHR connectors, and mobile apps that touch clinical data. A test that only checks the login page and calls it done misses where the real risk lives.
Why healthtech is a harder target than most
A few things make health platforms attractive to attackers and unforgiving when something goes wrong.
- PHI is worth more on the black market than card data. Medical records carry enough personal detail to support identity theft and insurance fraud long after a stolen credit card has been cancelled. That makes health data a durable target, not a one-time payout.
- Integrations multiply the attack surface. Most healthtech products are not closed systems. They pull from EHRs, push to pharmacy networks, sync with insurance clearinghouses, and often expose APIs to partner apps. Every integration point is a potential entry.
- Downtime has clinical consequences. A denial-of-service issue in a scheduling or e-prescribing platform is not just a revenue problem, it is a patient care problem. Buyers know this and test for it accordingly.
- Regulatory exposure stacks up. Depending on where you operate and who your customers are, you may be answering to PIPEDA, HIPAA, state privacy laws, and your enterprise customers' own vendor security questionnaires, often all at once.
None of this means healthtech founders need to panic. It means the testing has to be scoped by people who understand where clinical software actually breaks, not a generic checklist run against a generic web app.
What a real test looks like
A penetration test worth paying for is human-led. Automated scanners are useful for catching known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, but they will not find a broken authorization check that lets one clinic's staff pull another clinic's patient records, or a business logic flaw in how your app handles insurance eligibility lookups. Those require a person thinking like an attacker, not a script matching signatures. At traztech, testing is led by Jacob Masse, a published security researcher with six CVEs to his name, including a CVSS 9.1 finding that functioned as a kill-switch against the Mirai botnet. That is the calibre of researcher looking at your codebase, not a junior analyst working through a template. Engagements are co-delivered with Lorikeet, our offensive-security partner, which means healthtech clients get two sets of experienced eyes rather than one generalist running a tool.
Scoping typically covers three layers, tailored to what the platform actually does:
- Web application testing. Patient portals, provider dashboards, and admin consoles get tested for the OWASP Top 10 plus healthtech-specific issues like broken object-level authorization between patient records, insecure direct object references in appointment or lab result endpoints, and session handling around multi-factor authentication for clinical staff.
- API and integration testing. HL7/FHIR endpoints, third-party lab connectors, and partner-facing APIs get scrutinized for authentication gaps, data leakage between tenants, and improper input validation on clinical data fields.
- Network and cloud testing. Cloud infrastructure hosting PHI gets reviewed for misconfigurations, exposed storage, over-permissioned service accounts, and network segmentation between production and non-production environments.
This is the same rigour we apply across our broader security testing practice, adapted to the specific risks a health platform carries. The goal is not a long list of low-severity findings that pad a report. It is a clear picture of what an attacker could actually do with access to your system, ranked by real business impact.
One test, two purposes
Healthtech companies are usually being asked for a penetration test for one of two reasons: a customer's security questionnaire requires it, or they are working toward a certification like SOC 2. The good news is these do not have to be separate exercises. A properly scoped test doubles as evidence for both. The report format, the remediation timeline, and the retest documentation are built to satisfy an enterprise buyer's due diligence and to serve as an artifact in your SOC 2 or PCI evidence package. That matters because healthtech deals often get stuck exactly here. A CTO or founder has product-market fit, the sale is verbally agreed, and then procurement or a hospital security team asks for a current pentest report and the deal stalls for weeks while someone scrambles to book one. Having this done proactively, before it is the thing blocking a signature, keeps deals moving instead of sitting in a compliance queue.
What to expect from an engagement
A typical engagement runs in a few phases: scoping and rules of engagement, active testing (usually one to three weeks depending on the size of the environment), a findings review, and a written report with severity ratings, reproduction steps, and remediation guidance. We also offer a retest once fixes are in place, since a report full of open findings does not satisfy a customer's security team, a closed-out one does. If you are further along and thinking about the full compliance picture rather than a single test, our compliance services cover how penetration testing fits into a broader SOC 2 or PCI program, including the policies and controls that need to exist alongside the technical evidence.
Getting started
If you run a healthtech platform and a customer, investor, or partner is asking for a penetration test, or you know one is coming and want to get ahead of it, the right move is to scope it properly before you book anything. Every health platform is architected differently, and a test that ignores your specific integrations and data flows will miss the risks that matter most. Get in touch and we will walk through your architecture, figure out what needs testing, and give you a straight answer on timeline and cost before any work starts.