Incident response is the rehearsed sequence a team follows when a security event occurs: detect it, triage its severity, contain the damage, eradicate the cause, and recover normal operations. In healthcare a second track runs in parallel and is non-negotiable — assessing whether protected health information (PHI) was actually compromised. That assessment matters because it starts the clock under the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule, which requires notification without unreasonable delay and no later than 60 days after discovery of a breach. The technical response and the legal assessment are not the same activity and both have to happen at once.
A real plan names the people (who is incident commander, who talks to legal, who talks to customers), the communication paths, and the rules for handling evidence so a forensic timeline survives scrutiny. It also accounts for vendors: under your business associate agreements (BAAs), your subprocessors are obligated to report their incidents to you, and your plan has to ingest those reports and fold them into your own breach assessment and clock.
For a telemedicine product the engineering implication is that detection and logging must be good enough to actually answer "was PHI accessed, and whose?" after the fact — which loops directly back to audit logging and access control. The classic, costly mistake is discovering the plan during the incident. A response plan that has never been exercised is a document, not a capability; run tabletop exercises before production traffic and after every major architecture change, so that on the day it counts the team is rehearsing, not improvising.
