Censinet Reduces Risk to Healthcare

Healthcare Risks Are Expanding and Harder to Manage

The healthcare industry is experiencing a massive increase in serious, sophisticated data breaches and ransomware attacks. The cyber risk attack surface of health delivery organizations has expanded dramatically, driven by:

• Rapid digitization of healthcare management, clinical operations, research, and supply chain
• Growing proliferation of interconnected medical device and asset networks
• Increased integration of necessary third-party technologies into the core patient care stack

However, despite the extreme threat to care delivery and operational capacity, investments in security and risk assessment processes have not kept pace with the innovation. Most are predominantly managed through manual processes and legacy systems. This antiquated approach severely impedes the ability of health systems to sufficiently understand their risk exposure and cover their growing attack surface.

Providers often see third-party risk assessment as overly resource-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. They are forced to figure out which vendors to thoroughly assess based on perceived risk to the organization. As a result, risk assessments tend to be conducted only on new partnerships and rely on a combination of limited publicly available information and subjective perceptions to determine which vendors are thoroughly vetted. This focus only on the new heavily constrains visibility into overall risk exposure at the enterprise level. An emerging body of evidence suggests that third parties are the source of more than 40% of healthcare data breaches and ransomware. Longtime partners integrated into the critical provider infrastructure may be outmoded and under-protected, introducing critically underappreciated and under-assessed sources of risk.

Legacy Risk Tools Are Not Working

Spreadsheets. Text documents. To-do lists. These are risk products from a different cybersecurity era. These legacy tools (we really can’t call them solutions) require people-intensive manual processes. The side effect? They actually increase the risk to patient safety and data. Such healthcare risk management approaches are based on outdated assumptions that drive more manual processes and do nothing to break down the data silos. The symptoms of problems include:

• Vendors and products are stratified and prioritized based on perceived risks
• Remediations may be noted but often not resolved or completed
• Contract language lacks accurate risks and legal coverage
• Risk changes based on configuration, usage, updates, and other vendor and product
• Long-tail of unassessed vendors and products leave the health system exposed

How Censinet Solves Healthcare Risk

Censinet provides the first and only third-party risk management platform for healthcare organizations to manage the threats to patient care that exist within an expanding ecosystem of more than 27,000 assessed vendors and products. With its unique Censinet One-click Assessment™ capabilities and Digital Vendor Catalog™, the Censinet Intelligent Risk Network Platform reduces the time to assess vendor risk from weeks to seconds while automating inefficient workflows and providing continuous real-time insights into the changing risk profile of each vendor. Organizations achieve better ROI as automation, collaboration, and shared responsibility significantly increase throughput and reduce the need for more staff.

Censinet integrates with leading supply chain, data analytics, IT operations, security, and compliance platforms such as ServiceNow, RSA Archer, and KLAS. KLAS, a healthcare research and insights firm, and Censinet have partnered to deliver a new Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment to help healthcare providers uncover risks earlier in the procurement process, immediately giving providers the confidence they need to make decisions quickly. Censinet has also partnered with KidsX, a global accelerator for digital health pediatrics innovation, to help consortium members and participating digital health startups streamline cybersecurity assessments that improve security processes and practices that meet HIPAA security and privacy rules. Key capabilities include:

• Streamlined and purpose-built workflows that expand coverage, raise staff productivity, increase assessment velocity, and lower expenses
• Automated remediation, validation, and accountability to dramatically reduce risk exposure
• Correlation and mapping of vendors with PHI to BAAs to identify gaps in coverage
• Digitization of metadata to deliver actionable insights and remediations
• Alerts for cybersecurity incidents and new vulnerabilities for rapid risk resolution
• Integration of vendor risk with commitments to support legal and purchasing processes
• Risk Operations command center to overcome department risk silos and present an organizational view of risk

Because Integrating Risk and Operations Drives Better, More Efficient Outcomes

Censinet RiskOps enables departments to come together as a single, cohesive team that responds faster and more effectively to risks affecting business operations, care delivery, and patient safety. Business and clinical leaders benefit from efficient procurement processes, effective contracting, fewer post-purchase problems, and elimination of costly duplication and rework. Risk owners achieve maximum visibility across the lifecycle of processes, suppliers, and products, resulting in better enterprise performance:

• Integrated platform consolidates enterprise risk and operations across critical business areas – Clinical, Regulatory, Cybersecurity, Research, and Supply Chain
• Purpose-built for healthcare, Censinet RiskOps for healthcare IT and cybersecurity transforms risk with actionable insights
• Digital catalog with more than 26,000 assessed vendors and products drives unmatched productivity of third party and supply chain risk workflows
• Automated risk ratings and corrective action plans streamline the identification and remediation of risks
• Enables faster and more effective team response to risks affecting business operations, patient care delivery, and patient safety