How to Build a HIPAA-Compliant Healthcare Document Pipeline on .NET and Azure

A technical guide published on DEV Community outlines how to architect a production-grade healthcare document processing pipeline using .NET and Azure services. The pipeline is designed to handle tens of thousands of monthly hospital documents—including discharge summaries, lab reports, and imaging PDFs—converting them into FHIR-compliant, structured data. Key design choices covered include using Azure Document Intelligence for OCR, Azure Cognitive Search for HIPAA-compliant vector search, and Azure Container Apps for deterministic scaling over serverless options. The guide warns that poor orchestration, aggressive batching, and unversioned embeddings are common production pitfalls that can compromise both compliance and performance. According to the author, proper orchestration—not the AI model itself—represents the largest cost driver, but the right service mix can cut latency by 30–50% while keeping infrastructure costs under 10% of raw compute spend.