How to Get Started with HITRUST CSF Certification

Experienced security professionals at healthcare and life sciences organizations are familiar with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s (HIPAA) baseline requirements. However, these requirements are often characterized by vague verbiage and subjective interpretations, leaving organizations perplexed by the challenge of deciding which actions satisfy an appropriate level of security and privacy protection for Protected Health Information (PHI). Left unaddressed, this challenge can result in having critical systems without essential administrative, physical, technical, and organizational safeguards.

This is where the HITRUST CSF® comes into play as an actionable roadmap for organizations that process, transmit, and store PHI and PII. The HITRUST CSF was developed by IT and healthcare professionals to provide a highly prescriptive framework for managing the security requirements inherent in HIPAA. As such, HITRUST provides a certifiable information security framework that supplements and cross-references existing, globally recognized standards, regulations, and business requirements with healthcare and non-healthcare industry insights and leading practices to provide much-needed clarity and consistency. This harmonization of processes allows healthcare and life sciences organizations, as well as other organizations, and their vendors, to conduct a single assessment while meeting the requirements of multiple compliance initiatives.