HITRUST Certification is a globally recognized program that validates an organization’s compliance with the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF). An alternative to obtaining a HITRUST CSF Certification is the SOC 2 + HITRUST report, which serves as a collaboration between HITRUST and the AICPA.

Determining the scope of an assessment against the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF) is one of the first and most important tasks of the entire HITRUST assessment process. The assessment scope is a major factor in the level of effort required to complete an assessment, and is important to relying entities in determining if the services they use are assessed against the HITRUST CSF. However, for organizations with large or complex IT environments, the task of determining the scope of their HITRUST assessment(s) may seem daunting.

What is the SOC 2? At a high level a SOC 2 examination is a report on internal controls of a service organization related to the Trust Service Principles and Criteria (TSPs), which include: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and/or privacy. Reporting on these TSPs can provide assurance around the adequacy of your services’ security control environment.

HITRUST Basics The HITRUST set of security controls and safeguards (referred to as the ‘CSF’ or ‘Common Security Framework’) was developed using a risk-based approach to address the multitude of security, privacy, and regulatory challenges facing healthcare organizations. It includes control points derived from the HIPAA, HITECH, NIST, ISO, PCI, FTC, COBIT frameworks, as well as federal and state privacy laws.

As organizations face pressure to obtain third-party validation demonstrating their effective cybersecurity and risk management practices, they may wonder which compliance approach is best to pursue. HITRUST Certification is a globally recognized program that validates an organization’s compliance with the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF). An alternative to obtaining a HITRUST CSF Certification is the SOC 2 + HITRUST report, which serves as a collaboration between HITRUST and the AICPA.

In 2015 alone, 112 million healthcare records were compromised. If there’s one thing we can count on in the years to come, it would be increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity attacks that specifically target healthcare organizations. Why healthcare? Here are a few reasons.

Security is vital to the healthcare industry. Thirteen percent of CIOs, CTOs and CSOs reported being targeted by external threat attempts almost once a day, and 12 percent reported about two or more attacks per week. Furthermore, 16 percent of healthcare organizations admitted they are unable to detect in real time if their systems are compromised.