The rule, written out for a reader.
The skills encode the method as a procedure an agent can run. The guides are the same method in prose: what a rule requires, which provision requires it, what OCR actually enforces, and where programs come up thin against it. They are written to be read start to finish by someone who has to make a decision, not searched for a definition.
Four, and each says where it stops.
The map. What people call one rule is several, stapled together over two decades, sitting on top of state law that can reach further than the federal floor. Start here to see how the pieces fit before reading any one of them.
Read the HIPAA guide →Where most day-to-day compliance lives: what you may do with protected health information in any form, the four standards that drive the bulk of the work, and the rights patients hold over their own records.
Read the Privacy Rule guide →The proposed 2026 overhaul in plain terms: whether it is real yet, the one change that would matter most if it lands, and the three moves worth making while it is still proposed.
Read the Security Rule guide →For an organization about to put generative AI on regulated work. How to tell whether you can specify a correct output before you pick a tool, the three ways a tool arrives without anyone deciding, and what to record on day one so an inventory never has to be reconstructed.
Read the AI tooling guide →The Self-Checks are a click away.
A guide tells you what the rule asks for. A Self-Check places your own program against it: the Seven Elements readiness questions, or the three stages of the compliance maturity matrix. Both run in your browser, free, with no email gate and nothing sent anywhere. They are published at dangssolutions.com.
A guide is not an answer about your program.
Each of these states what a rule requires and cites the provision it read that from. None of them has seen your documents, so none of them can tell you whether you meet it. That reading is what the skills do, and what a person then has to weigh. The guides are also operational explainers rather than legal advice, and each one names its primary source so you can go read the text yourself.
Need this done rather than explained? Dan Gonzalez runs Dang's Solutions, the practice that delivers it.