Duty of Care Compliance Software: Beyond HIPAA to Physical Security

Search "duty of care compliance software" and every result is about HIPAA, healthcare privacy, and patient data protection. That is a completely different world. If you are a security director trying to find software that helps you meet duty of care obligations for employees in high-risk regions, those results are useless. This guide is for you.

Duty of care in the physical security context means something fundamentally different from duty of care in healthcare. It refers to an employer's legal and ethical obligation to take reasonable steps to protect employees from foreseeable harm, particularly when those employees are deployed to volatile regions, traveling internationally, or working in remote and dangerous environments.

The software category barely exists. Enterprise critical event management platforms address pieces of it. Travel risk management tools handle another slice. But a purpose-built compliance layer that ties threat monitoring, alerting, documentation, and ISO 31030 alignment into a single affordable platform? That is what most organizations are actually searching for, and struggling to find.

What Duty of Care Actually Means for Physical Security

At its core, duty of care is a legal obligation. Employers must take reasonable steps to protect employees from foreseeable harm. This obligation exists in common law across the UK, US, Australia, Canada, and most of the countries where international organizations operate. When an employee is sent to a region where there are known security risks, conflict, political instability, crime, health emergencies, the employer has a heightened responsibility to monitor those risks and act on them.

The legal standard is "reasonableness." Courts do not expect employers to eliminate all risk. They expect employers to demonstrate that they identified foreseeable threats, communicated those threats to employees, and had plans in place to respond. The failure is not in the event happening, it is in the organization not knowing, not warning, and not preparing.

ISO 31030 formalized this obligation for travel in 2021. The ISO 31030 travel risk management standard provides a framework for organizations to assess, mitigate, and document travel-related risks. It is not a law, it is a standard, but it is increasingly referenced in legal proceedings and insurance evaluations as the benchmark for what "reasonable" looks like.

For organizations operating in high-risk environments, particularly NGOs with heightened duty of care obligations, the absence of affordable, purpose-built compliance software creates real liability. Field teams operate without documented threat assessments. Travel approvals happen over email with no audit trail. Incident reports are filed in spreadsheets that no one reviews. When something goes wrong, the organization cannot demonstrate that it met its duty of care.

The 5 Pillars of Duty of Care Compliance

Whether you are building a compliance program from scratch or evaluating software to support an existing one, duty of care for physical security rests on five pillars. Each one represents a capability that your organization needs to demonstrate, and that any software you adopt should support.

1. Threat Assessment and Monitoring

The foundation of duty of care is knowing what threats exist. This means continuous monitoring of the regions where your employees operate, not just country-level travel advisories, but ground-level intelligence about specific cities, routes, and facilities. A protest blocking the road to your mining site in Peru matters more than a State Department country rating. Real-time monitoring of local-language news, social media, and government announcements is what separates actionable intelligence from stale reports.

2. Travel Risk Management

Every trip to a high-risk region should have a documented risk assessment. ISO 31030 outlines the process: pre-travel risk evaluation, approval workflows, traveler briefings, and in-country support. The software should generate travel risk assessments aligned with ISO 31030, track approval chains, and maintain records that demonstrate the organization evaluated risks before authorizing travel.

3. Communication and Alerting

When a threat emerges, the organization must be able to reach affected employees quickly. This requires alerting systems that can push notifications to field staff based on their location, communication channels that work in low-connectivity environments, and escalation protocols that ensure the right people are informed at the right time. A security incident in Bamako should trigger an alert to every employee in Mali within minutes, not hours.

4. Emergency Response Planning

Duty of care extends beyond monitoring and alerting to response. Organizations must have documented emergency response plans for the regions where they operate, evacuation routes, safe havens, medical evacuation procedures, and crisis communication protocols. The software should support the creation, storage, and activation of these plans so they are accessible when needed, not buried in a shared drive.

5. Documentation and Audit Trails

This is the pillar that matters most in legal proceedings. If an employee is harmed and the organization faces a lawsuit, the question will be: "What did you know, when did you know it, and what did you do about it?" Every threat assessment, every alert sent, every travel approval, every incident report, all of it needs to be documented with timestamps and accessible for audit. Software that does not generate compliance records is not compliance software.

Why HIPAA Tools Don't Apply

The search result confusion exists because "duty of care" has completely different meanings in healthcare versus physical security. In healthcare, duty of care relates to a provider's obligation to deliver competent treatment and protect patient information. HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a US federal regulation that governs the privacy and security of patient health data. HIPAA compliance software helps healthcare organizations track who accesses patient records, encrypt data transmissions, manage consent forms, and audit electronic health records.

None of that is relevant to a security director trying to protect field staff in South Sudan.

Here is what healthcare compliance teams need versus what physical security teams need:

Healthcare (HIPAA) teams need: electronic health record encryption, access control logging, patient consent management, data breach notification workflows, business associate agreement tracking, and privacy impact assessments.

Physical security teams need: real-time threat monitoring for employee locations, travel risk assessments aligned with ISO 31030, mass notification and alerting systems, evacuation planning and activation tools, incident documentation with audit trails, and local-language intelligence coverage for the regions where staff operate.

These are entirely different technology stacks solving entirely different problems. Yet because HIPAA compliance software has been a mature market for over a decade, those vendors dominate the "duty of care compliance software" search results. Physical security professionals searching for tools to protect their people end up on pages about encrypting patient records.

The distinction matters for procurement as well. HIPAA tools are evaluated by IT and legal teams concerned with data privacy. Duty of care tools for physical security are evaluated by security directors, risk managers, and operations teams concerned with employee safety. The buyers are different, the requirements are different, and the decision criteria are different.

What Duty of Care Compliance Software Should Do

If you are evaluating platforms to support your duty of care obligations for physical security, here are the capabilities that matter, ranked by impact on actual compliance outcomes.

Real-Time Threat Monitoring for Employee Locations

The software must monitor threats in the specific regions where your employees are located, not just at the country level, but at the city, district, and site level. A flood in Jakarta matters if your team is in Jakarta. A flood in Surabaya does not. Geographically precise, real-time monitoring is the baseline capability. Without it, you cannot demonstrate that you were aware of foreseeable threats.

Travel Risk Assessments Aligned with ISO 31030

Pre-travel risk assessments should be generated automatically based on current conditions, not copied from a template that was last updated six months ago. The assessment should reflect the actual threat landscape at the time of travel, reference relevant advisories and incidents, and be stored as a compliance record tied to the specific trip and traveler.

Alerting and Communication Channels

When a threat is detected, the platform should push alerts to affected personnel through multiple channels, email, SMS, push notification, and ideally messaging platforms like WhatsApp or Signal that field teams actually use. Alerting latency matters. A system that sends alerts within five minutes of detection is fundamentally more useful than one that batches alerts into a daily digest.

Incident Documentation and Reporting

Every security incident, near-miss, and threat alert should be logged automatically with timestamps, affected personnel, actions taken, and outcomes. This creates the audit trail that demonstrates compliance. When a lawyer asks "what did you do when the protest was reported in Kinshasa," you should be able to pull a timestamped record showing the alert was sent to all 14 employees in-country within eight minutes of detection.

Local-Language Intelligence Coverage

Most threats in emerging markets are reported first in local languages. A pipeline explosion in Mozambique appears in Portuguese-language local media hours before it reaches English-language wire services. A road blockade in Guatemala is reported in Spanish-language social media before any international outlet picks it up. If your monitoring tool only processes English-language sources, you are missing the earliest and most actionable intelligence. Coverage in 100+ languages is not a luxury, it is a requirement for genuine duty of care compliance.

Cost Accessibility

Duty of care obligations apply to every employer, not just Fortune 500 companies. An NGO with 50 staff in the Sahel has the same legal obligation to protect its employees as a multinational oil company. Yet enterprise critical event management platforms cost $50,000 to $200,000+ per year, putting compliance out of reach for the organizations that arguably need it most. Software that delivers genuine duty of care compliance capabilities at a price point accessible to mid-market companies and NGOs fills a critical gap in the market.

Platform Comparison for Duty of Care

The market for duty of care compliance in physical security is fragmented across three categories: enterprise critical event management (CEM) platforms, travel risk management platforms, and purpose-built intelligence tools. Here is how they compare across the capabilities that matter for compliance.

Enterprise CEM platforms like Everbridge, OnSolve, and Dataminr are designed for large security operations centers. They offer robust capabilities but require dedicated teams to operate, long implementation cycles, and budgets that exclude most organizations. Travel risk management platforms like International SOS and WorldAware focus on traveler tracking and pre-trip assessments but often lack the real-time, local-language monitoring needed for comprehensive duty of care compliance.

Region Alert occupies a different position: a real-time intelligence platform that monitors local-language sources across 100+ languages, delivers actionable alerts to field teams, and provides the documentation layer needed for compliance, at a price point accessible to mid-market companies and NGOs.

Building a Duty of Care Compliance Stack

No single tool covers every aspect of duty of care compliance. The most effective approach is a layered stack where each layer addresses a specific compliance requirement. Here is the architecture that works.

Layer 1: Intelligence Monitoring (Detect Threats)

This is the foundation. You need a platform that continuously monitors the regions where your employees operate and surfaces emerging threats in real time. The monitoring should cover local-language sources, not just English-language wire services, and should be precise enough to distinguish between threats that affect your specific locations and general noise. This layer generates the awareness that duty of care requires: you knew about the threat because your monitoring system detected it.

For actionable approaches to employee safety monitoring, see our guide on employee safety in emerging markets.

Layer 2: Communication (Alert Employees)

Detection without communication is liability without protection. When your monitoring layer identifies a threat, you need to push that information to the affected employees immediately. The communication layer should support multiple channels (email, SMS, push, messaging apps), allow segmentation by location and team, and log every alert sent with timestamps and delivery confirmation. This layer demonstrates that you warned your people.

Layer 3: Response (Evacuation, Medical)

When the situation escalates beyond an alert, you need response capabilities. This may include evacuation coordination, medical evacuation services, safe haven protocols, and crisis management procedures. For some organizations, this means maintaining a relationship with a response provider like International SOS or Crisis24. For others, it means documented internal procedures. Either way, the response plans must exist, be accessible, and be tested.

Layer 4: Documentation (Audit Trail, Compliance Records)

Every action across Layers 1 through 3 must be documented. Threat detections, alerts sent, employee acknowledgments, response actions taken, incident reports filed, all of it feeds into the compliance record that demonstrates your organization met its duty of care. This layer is what separates organizations that are actually compliant from organizations that are just hoping nothing goes wrong.

For a comprehensive framework on managing travel-related risks across all four layers, see our travel risk management guide.

Industry-Specific Requirements

Duty of care obligations apply universally, but the specific requirements and risk profiles vary significantly by industry. Here is how the compliance landscape differs across the sectors most affected by physical security risks.

NGOs and Humanitarian Organizations

NGOs face a unique combination of heightened duty of care obligations and severely limited budgets. Staff are deployed to conflict zones, post-disaster environments, and regions with active armed groups, the highest-risk operating environments on earth. At the same time, funding constraints mean that enterprise security platforms costing $100,000+ per year are simply not an option. NGOs also face additional complexity around duty of care for national staff, who often face greater risks than international personnel but may receive fewer security resources. Compliance in this sector requires affordable tools that deliver genuine protective capability, not watered-down versions of enterprise products. See our dedicated guide on duty of care for NGOs.

Mining and Extractive Industries

Mining operations present distinct duty of care challenges: remote site locations with limited connectivity, community relations that can escalate to security incidents, regulatory requirements that vary by jurisdiction, and long project lifecycles that require sustained monitoring over years or decades. A gold mine in Burkina Faso needs intelligence about artisanal mining conflicts, community grievances, armed group movements, and government regulatory changes, all monitored in French and local languages. The compliance requirement extends beyond employee safety to include community impact assessments and social license to operate. See our mining site security monitoring guide for detailed coverage.

Oil and Gas

Oil and gas operations involve critical infrastructure that is both a high-value target and a high-consequence environment. Pipeline security across hundreds of kilometers, offshore platform safety, refinery perimeter protection, and maritime security for shipping routes all fall under the duty of care umbrella. The regulatory environment is often more prescriptive than other industries, with governments imposing specific security requirements as conditions of operating licenses. Intelligence needs span geopolitical risk (sanctions, regime change, nationalization threats), physical security (sabotage, theft, terrorism), and operational risk (environmental incidents, labor disputes). See our oil and gas intelligence sector page.

Logistics and Supply Chain

Logistics companies face duty of care obligations for drivers, warehouse staff, and supply chain managers operating across multiple jurisdictions. Route planning through high-risk corridors, border crossing risks, cargo theft patterns, and port security conditions all require monitoring. A trucking company moving goods through the Northern Triangle needs real-time intelligence about road blockades, carjacking hotspots, and border processing delays. The compliance challenge is compounded by the distributed nature of logistics operations, employees are moving, not stationary, which requires monitoring capabilities that track threats along routes rather than at fixed locations.

Last updated: February 2026. ISO 31030 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization. HIPAA is a US federal regulation. Region Alert is not a legal advisor, consult qualified counsel for specific duty of care obligations in your jurisdiction.