Amid heightened threats to the nation’s healthcare systems, more than 20 leading healthcare organizations have come together to identify effective, efficient, and new innovative approaches to reduce cyber risk across the healthcare industry’s third-party ecosystem.
The Health 3rd Party Trust (Health3PT) Initiative and Council, announced Thursday, it is committed to bringing standards, credible assurance models, and automated workflows to solve the third-party risk management problem and advance the mission to safeguard sensitive information.
Healthcare is one of the top industry sectors targeted by cyber attackers due to the value of sensitive electronic patient records, the potential impact on critical life-saving IT systems and medical devices, and the lack of security around the third-party vendors and suppliers delivering vital services. According to one survey, 55 per cent of healthcare organizations suffered a third-party breach in the past year. However, most healthcare organizations do not have effective measures in place to identify these risks. Only 23 per cent of security and risk leaders monitor third parties in real time for cybersecurity exposure, according to Gartner data.
With increasing government warnings—such as HHS’ Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center’s recent alerts on ransomware and last December’s alert from CISA, FBI and NSA to mitigate Log4j software supply chain vulnerabilities—as well as anticipated regulatory guidance for cross-sector Cybersecurity Common Performance Goals, healthcare organizations are looking for ways to understand and ensure the security, integrity, and availability of services provided by third parties and the associated sensitive information they handle.
Unfortunately, today’s methods to manage these third-party risk exposures are burdensome and inadequate, with each vendor handling their assessments differently and often manually, resulting in blind spots on risks, limited follow-through on remediation of identified risks, complacency regarding continuous monitoring, and insufficient assurance programmes to prove that the right security controls are in place. This is especially true for smaller organizations who have limited resources and are often where many breaches occur.
In response, the Health3PT is collaborating to overcome these challenges and achieve greater efficiencies throughout the ecosystem. The Health3PT will focus first on a series of common practices to effectively manage information security risks associated with vendors and other third-party service providers. These include methodologies and tools that address multiple best practice frameworks, foster standardization and transparent assurances and validation, and address legislative and regulatory requirements.
The Health3PT will publish its first deliverable in Q1 2023: Research on third-party risk metrics to benchmark the state of the industry. In addition, in 2023, the Health3PT will establish working groups and will host industry-wide events including a Summit for vendors, healthcare third-party risk management stakeholders, and assessor organizations.
The Health3PT has overwhelming support from key industry stakeholders and is comprised of security and risk executives from 20 leading healthcare providers, health systems, health payors/insurers, and healthcare service organizations:
- Director, Information Risk Management, AmeriHealth Caritas, Patricia Yarabinetz
- Cyber Risk Management, Amerisource Bergen, Cindy Shuna
- Director, Cyber Risk Management, Amerisource Bergen, Rick Kratz
- Principal, Attest Health Care Advisors, Glen Braden
- Principal Technical Program Manager, Governance, Risk, & Program Management, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Dr. Omar Sangurima
- Deputy CISO, Centura Health, Shenny Sheth
- Executive Director, Third Party Risk Governance, CVS, Natalie Henderson
- VP, Information & Cyber Security, Evolent Health, Eric Sinclair
- AVP – Product Security, Chief Product Security Officer, HCA Healthcare, Matthew Webb
- Divisional VP, Operations Performance Management, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) Brenda Callaway
- CISO, Healthix, John Chow
- VP of Enterprise Technology Services, HealthStream, Jeff Lockwood
- Sr. Director, Information Security, HealthStream¸ Karin Balsley
- CISO, Highmark Health, Omar Khawaja
- Project Manager, Highmark BCBS, Heather Ryan
- Cyber Data Protection Manager, Humana, Joe Dylewski
- Project Manager, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Purvik Shah
- Cyber Security Governance, Risk and Compliance Analyst, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Walsy Saez-Aguirre
- Executive Director of Information Security, Executive Director of Information Security, Piedmont Healthcare, Monique Hart
- VP, CISO, Premera Blue Cross, Dr. Adrian Mayers
- Deputy CISO, Premera Blue Cross, Joel Seymour
- CISO, St. Lukes Health System, Shawna Hofer
- CISO, Tufts Medicine, Brian Cayer
- Director of Information Assurance, Tufts Medicine, Alan Labianca-Campbell
- VP, Information Security and Privacy, UPMC, John Houston
- Sr. Director – IT, IAS, UPMC, Ryan George
- Vice President, Information Security, Virtual Health, Alex Zhivov
- Senior Manager, Technology, Risk & Compliance, Walgreens, Bhavesh Merai
“Society has evolved to demand speed of delivery, and this is no different in the healthcare space. However, we cannot sacrifice security for speed. A standardized and measurable standard for assessing third parties will bring both speed and efficiency, while potentially increasing security. This also could drive reduced costs through efficiency. A standardized and measurable assessment mechanism will be the cornerstone in securing people’s most precious information,” said Deputy CISO for Premera Blue Cross, Joel Seymour.
“It’s clear that TPRM is broken in the healthcare industry. We need to come together as an industry to establish a sustainable approach to third-party risk management. The common process of sending and receiving self-attested proprietary questionnaires is inefficient and potentially unreliable. We need a practical pathway to supplier assurances that are reliable and not self-attested, have inadequate controls or over burdening for the risk posed. The lack of standardization today results in vendor confusion due to the different question sets and requirements, resulting in confusion, frustration, and eventually…lack of response,” said CISO for Healthix, Inc., a large, public New York State based HIE, John Chow.
“Managing third party risk in a comprehensive and sustainable way requires collaboration between healthcare organizations and their suppliers to find solutions that are efficient and effective for both sides. That’s why the Health3PT is so important to Centura Health and our partnerships. In order for this to work, we need more healthcare organizations to adopt common, standardized processes,” said Deputy CISO for Centura Health, Shenny Sheth.
The Health3PT is seeking participation from all healthcare organizations.
