In today’s digital age, where data breaches and cyber threats are everywhere, it’s more important than ever to have a reliable assurance that empowers organizations to earn the trust of their internal and external stakeholders.

HITRUST is committed to providing just that, with an assurance process grounded in six essential principles — transparency, scalability, consistency, accuracy, integrity, and efficiency. These principles ensure that every HITRUST certification awarded is both relevant to today’s risk landscape and reliable in its evaluation and reporting.

Let’s delve into each of these principles and understand why they are crucial for establishing trust.

Transparency

HITRUST believes in openness and clarity throughout its certification process. It fosters trust among organizations seeking certification as they can cross-reference any requirement with its corresponding authoritative source. Organizations are able to maintain visibility into requirement selection, evaluation, and scoring by reviewing the assessment process and scoring methodology in the publicly available HITRUST Assessment Handbook.

Scalability

In a rapidly evolving risk landscape, one-size-fits-all approaches to security simply don’t suffice. Recognizing this, HITRUST has developed a scalable cybersecurity assurance process to accommodate organizations of varying sizes, complexities, and risk profiles. HITRUST’s varying assessment options, which include the ability to seamlessly move from one assessment type to the other, cater to these needs. Moreover, HITRUST updates its framework regularly to keep up with emerging threats, ensuring the universal HITRUST CSF is relevant and cyber threat adaptive. According to the HITRUST 2024 Trust Report, 97% of all threat indicators in the MITRE ATT&CK are covered in HITRUST CSF version 11.2.

Consistency

Consistency is the hallmark of reliability. HITRUST maintains rigorous standards and procedures to ensure consistency in its certification process. All External Assessors authorized to perform HITRUST assessments must undergo a vetting and training process prior to becoming a part of HITRUST’s formal assessor program. HITRUST’s consistency not only enhances the credibility of its certifications but also facilitates benchmarking and comparison, enabling organizations to gauge their security posture relative to peers and industry standards.

Accuracy

In matters of security, accuracy is non-negotiable. HITRUST places a premium on accuracy throughout its certification process, employing validated assessment methodologies, robust controls, and stringent procedures to ensure the reliability and precision of its evaluations. It provides the only assessment report that clearly articulates control maturity using an innovative PRISMA-based scoring model. All HITRUST validated assessments must use the HITRUST scoring rubric to accurately reflect the organization’s control maturity. By upholding high standards of accuracy, HITRUST provides organizations with confidence that their certification demonstrates a true and comprehensive assessment of their security practices.

Integrity

Integrity forms the cornerstone of trust. HITRUST upholds the highest ethical standards and integrity in its certification process, ensuring impartiality, objectivity, and independence at every stage. HITRUST follows a centralized quality assurance process, including the use of the Assurance Intelligence Engine (AIE) to conduct over 150 automated quality checks. Each validated assessment submitted to HITRUST undergoes a detailed quality assurance review. Further, by involving third-party, independent assessors, HITRUST instills confidence in stakeholders that the certification process is free from bias, thereby enhancing the credibility of its certifications.

Efficiency

In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficiency is key. HITRUST recognizes the importance of efficiency and streamlines its certification process to minimize time, resources, and disruptions for organizations seeking certification. By adopting efficient workflows, providing automated tools, and harmonizing best practices, HITRUST enables organizations to achieve certification promptly and cost-effectively, without compromising the rigor or quality of the assessment. The HITRUST Shared Responsibility and Inheritance Program allows organizations to inherit controls from previous assessments and streamline their assessment process. Furthermore, organizations can meet and exceed multiple compliance requirements and stakeholder requests with a single HITRUST certification.

In conclusion, HITRUST’s commitment to these six essential principles sets it apart, providing a reliable assurance process. Organizations that seek HITRUST certification can rest assured that their commitment to security is backed by a rigorous and trustworthy cybersecurity assurance process that upholds the highest standards of excellence. Learn more about HITRUST’s proven methodology from its inaugural Trust Report.

Building a robust cybersecurity posture is challenging. But what’s more challenging is earning the trust of internal and external stakeholders in your cybersecurity programs.  

If you’re looking for a way to enhance your organization’s cybersecurity posture and demonstrate your commitment to protecting sensitive data, you may want to consider obtaining a HITRUST certification. HITRUST is widely recognized as the gold standard for security, compliance, and risk management in various industries, from healthcare to finance to education.  

But why exactly should you place your trust in HITRUST? Here are five compelling reasons.  

1.  Lowers the chances of a security breach 

HITRUST has established a comprehensive assurance program that allows organizations to demonstrate they have the necessary cyber resilience capabilities to protect, detect, respond, and recover from potential cyberattacks. A resulting certification helps to boost stakeholders’ confidence in your cybersecurity programs.  

But don’t just take our word for it. Data revealed in the HITRUST 2024 Trust Report show that less than 1% (0.64%) of organizations that achieved HITRUST certifications have reported a security breach to HITRUST in the past two years. The relevance and reliability of HITRUST assurances empower you to trust its effectiveness.    

2.  Aligns best practices from trusted sources  

One of the key benefits of HITRUST certifications is that they are based on HITRUST’s universal framework, the HITRUST CSF. The CSF harmonizes best practices, controls, and frameworks that address specific risks. The latest version of the CSF incorporates standards and regulations from various authoritative sources, such as HIPAA, NIST, PCI-DSS, ISO, and GDPR. This enables your organization to streamline compliance efforts and avoid duplication and gaps.  

3.  Foresees emerging threats  

As cyber threats become more complex and diverse, it becomes crucial to adopt a proactive approach to security rather than a reactive one. That’s why, the cyber threat-adaptive HITRUST CSF is constantly updated. HITRUST leverages threat intelligence data from the MITRE ATT&CK framework. It ensures that the HITRUST CSF stays relevant in the evolving threat landscape so that your organization stays on top of the latest developments and best practices.  

4.  Follows a high-quality review process 

Each HITRUST assessment undergoes a comprehensive quality review prior to certification. This meticulous process affirms that certified systems have met the HITRUST requirements. The quality review is essential to maintaining the integrity and value of HITRUST certifications, offering an unmatched level of trust and reliability.   

5.  Fosters continuous improvement 

HITRUST certification does not represent a one-time achievement but a commitment to continuous improvement. Data in the Trust Report show that organizations remediated 92% of HITRUST-identified control deficiencies within a year of achieving an r2 certification. HITRUST encourages organizations not only to identify and address current security gaps but also to constantly enhance their cybersecurity measures. HITRUST’s proactive approach to cybersecurity exemplifies its role in shaping a more secure and resilient digital landscape.  

Key takeaway  

The HITRUST 2024 Trust Report shows that a HITRUST certification reduces the risk of an organization experiencing a data breach. The significance of this statistic cannot be overstated. In an era where digital threats are increasingly sophisticated, achieving a HITRUST certification is not just a mark of compliance— it’s a testament to an organization’s dedication to safeguarding sensitive information. HITRUST offers invaluable assurance, providing peace of mind to stakeholders and reinforcing trust within the digital ecosystem.  

If you’re interested in learning more about why HITRUST assurances are trustworthy and reliable, check out the full HITRUST 2024 Trust Report.  

Don’t let cyber threats hold you back. Get a HITRUST certification and stay ahead of the curve. 

As part of HITRUST’s commitment to deliver greater customer value, MyCSF includes many innovative features that add efficiency and reduce effort. One of the biggest labor savers in the HITRUST MyCSF is the ability to reuse completed scoring results from past assessments when starting a new one.

Let’s explore these easy-to-use capabilities that allow you to import or replicate results from past work.

MyCSF provides many ways to repurpose existing assessment data and save time and resources

Reusing past work delivers enormous value by reducing time, effort, and cost. More importantly, it alleviates the burden of starting from scratch, preventing resource drain, frustration, and audit fatigue within your team.

Control inheritance, cloning, and offline assessments are key MyCSF features designed to increase efficiency. Yet, many HITRUST community users remain unfamiliar with these techniques that simplify control scoring in new assessments.

Control inheritance

Inheritance is undoubtedly the most talked about HITRUST program as users seek to reduce redundancy in rescoring controls. Inheritance delivers enormous value by importing previously performed testing results, scores, and comments from completed assessments directly into new ones.

Control inheritance can be of two types.

• External: Inherit up to 85% of shared control testing scores from HITRUST certified third-party cloud service providers.
• Internal: Inherit results from your organization’s own assessments (available only in Corporate and Premium subscriptions).

Cloning

With cloning, you can replicate an exact copy of a previous assessment to capture control maturity scoring, update to the latest HITRUST CSF version, and reflect changes to your environment.

Offline assessment module

Download and populate a separate spreadsheet with existing scoring results to facilitate modifications to control requirement scoring. Plus, you can use the module to identify and instantly generate inheritance requests.

Summary

Leveraging the innovative MyCSF features of control inheritance, cloning, and offline assessments to rely on past work drives enormous efficiencies that significantly reduce time and manual effort. Tapping into your organization’s library of existing assessment data, along with the completed control scoring provided by your external assessor, streamlines the process of creating new reports, including readiness, validated, and certification assessments.

For additional information about using HITRUST MyCSF to reuse past work, please contact your HITRUST Customer Success Manager.