Open-source IT for small behavioral health and psychiatric practices. on Lintra

Is Nextcloud HIPAA-compliant for a small practice?

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you run a small behavioral health or psychiatric practice and you’ve started looking at what it would cost to keep paying Microsoft or Google forever, you have probably found Nextcloud. It does what you need — files, sharing, document editing, calendars, desktop and mobile sync — and it’s free.

Then you hit the question that stops everything: can I legally put patient records in it?

The short answer is yes, and I’ll show you the configuration. But there’s a specific piece that nearly every self-hosting guide gets backwards, and it’s the piece that would actually hurt you in an audit. That’s most of what this post is about.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Matthew Wells. I build and run open-source IT infrastructure for small behavioral health and psychiatric practices, out of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Why this exists#

Small practices get a bad deal on IT, and it’s structural rather than anybody being villainous about it.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Email is the fastest way to reach me, and it goes straight to me rather than a queue.

mwells@lintra.cloud · (662) 292-3217

Useful things to include if you’re inquiring about the service: roughly how many clinicians and staff, how many workstations, what you’re running now, and whether you’re migrating or starting fresh. None of it is required — “can we talk” is a perfectly good email.

Questions about a post are welcome too, and I don’t treat those as sales leads.

Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I build and run the complete IT stack for small practices using open-source software, on cloud infrastructure dedicated to that practice alone.

It’s the same set of things a Microsoft 365 subscription plus a traditional MSP would give you — file storage, document editing, single sign-on, password management, security monitoring, remote support, backups — with two differences. You aren’t renting per-seat licences you can never stop paying, and your data sits on infrastructure you could take custody of tomorrow if you wanted to.