Any healthcare cybersecurity or risk management professional will tell you that HITRUST is the definitive “Gold standard” for compliance and risk mitigation. Why? It stems from thorough, precise methodology combined with a holistic view of verified, implemented controls and organizational processes. There’s simply no substitute in today’s sophisticated, high-stakes era of data vulnerability.
Precision and Validation Require Effort, Time, and Cost
As a tenured HITRUST assessor, leading the effort for over a dozen years, we have had the opportunity to consult with hundreds of clients with a variety of maturity levels and application/compute infrastructures.
Almost without exception, clients’ most unrelenting challenge is simply navigating the cost and time needed to gather the granular security information for each system and verifying its contents. A midsize healthcare organization can have many systems with hundreds of needed controls that all require the same amount of effort. When you consider that HITRUST CSF certification is a continuous process that follows a defined lifecycle, the cumulative costs of manual compliance can quickly add up.
Cloudy Forecast Looms Ahead
As secure cloud computing increases momentum, our clients are rapidly deploying primary and ancillary systems to cloud architectures. These platforms offer many benefits to healthcare IT organizations including flexibility, rapid deployment, and scalability.
However, as the number of systems proliferates, the manual controls needed to secure and maintain HITRUST CSF certification has grown along with increasing cost over it’s lifecycle.
A Step-Wise Approach to Easing Hitrust Woes
As you embark on your HITRUST CSF certification effort, analyze the lifecycle costs of compliance for a variety of scenarios with your assessor – and determine the best fit for your organization.
Additionally, look for ways to leverage established compliance and security automation platforms into your overall HITRUST strategy. In our work with clients, maximizing operational fitness includes finding the right balance of HITRUST CSF certification criteria needed to qualify contrasted with the important security gaps that may exist and need to be addressed.
Where these impacted systems are cloud-based, opportunities to automate the ongoing work of monitoring and maintaining compliance can drive long-term cost savings.
Partnering With Cleardata to Streamline Hitrust Certifications for Healthcare
Recently, Intraprise entered into a partnership with ClearDATA, a leader in cloud compliance and cybersecurity automation. We integrate the company’s cloud compliance platform into our HITRUST security practice. Cumulatively, we bring Intraprise’s strategic wisdom and ClearDATA cloud compliance automation together to provide our clients with HITRUST certification execution at a higher level of speed and scalability – and at lower cost.
Our project management teams will work with clients to apply the ClearDATA platform on the right cloud systems as part of an overall HITRUST certification strategy and lifecycle plan. The application of the ClearDATA platform will increase speed and accuracy to select systems, while lowering the cost of achieving and maintaining HITRUST certification.
HITRUST Certification Requirements: The Conclusion
By design, HITRUST is a comprehensive process involving systems and organizational controls with corresponding manual effort. The strategy of how to comply with the methodology’s domain scoring demands is a critical driver of how much manual effort is required over the entire lifecycle of HITRUST compliance. Intraprise Health is very pleased to be able to collaborate with ClearDATA to bring sustainable automation to our client’s ongoing HITRUST journey.
For more information on the partnership contact our HITRUST Assessor team at 888-329-0067.
