Healthcare information security leaders are faced with the dauting challenge of securing information systems and data at a time when the cyber threat landscape is evolving rapidly and becomingly increasingly complex.
Most patient care organizations’ supply chains are filled with third parties who support the care delivery process and require access to patient information. Properly vetting and monitoring these third parties is a major challenge, and in some cases, insurmountable for many organizations who simply don’t have the expertise or resources, according to healthcare IT security leaders.
Many healthcare chief information security officers (CISOs) have found that effectively assessing the security posture up and down the supply chain is expensive given the complexity of the risks posed by privacy and security concerns, as well as an everchanging regulatory landscape. Currently, the process of managing third-party risk is often inefficient and time-consuming, for both vendors and providers, while still leaving organizations vulnerable to security threats.
During a recent webinar, sponsored by HITRUST, focused on healthcare cybersecurity and managing third party risk, John Houston, vice president, privacy and information security at the 40-hospital UPMC health system in Pittsburgh, outlined a number of factors that have made third-party risk management increasingly challenging and complex.
“There has been a fundamental change in IT, and a rapid move to the cloud. At the same time, we all see an increasingly complex cyber threat landscape where the threats are more sophisticated, and the technology solutions are more sophisticated as our business requirements are changing. It’s an increasingly complex landscape,” Houston said.
He further noted, “As a result, there is a lot of confusion about how we best ensure our information is secure and available, and what is reasonable in terms of trying to achieve that. And finally, we are all worried about risk, and the biggest risk is patient safety. We worry about the cost of litigation and penalties, but first and foremost, we need to think about ensuring that we are able to deliver the best care to our patients.”
The stakes are changing, Houston noted, as federal regulators are investigating and penalizing organizations for failure to monitor third parties’ security practices, and hackers are increasingly targeting medical devices, he said.
“From a CISO perspective, we need to ensure that we are applying proper oversight over all of this. We can’t assume third parties are doing the right thing,” he said.
What’s more, healthcare organizations are increasingly reliant on cloud technology. A year ago, Nuance Communications, a provider of voice and language tools, was knocked offline when the company was hit with the Petya ransomware virus.
“I was around during Y2K, and about 95 percent of all our applications at UPMC, we ran within the data center, on premise. About 95 percent of newly acquired applications were run on on-premise, there was little on the cloud. In that environment, it falls upon the entity to secure data within its possession,” he said.
Contrast that with today’s environment, as Houston noted that “very little of what we acquire today runs on-premise. In some way, shape or form, at least one copy of the data is in the cloud.”
Studies have estimated that by 2023 no more than 25 percent of applications will be run on-premise in an organization’s data center, with about 75 percent run in the cloud, Houston said. “Many copies of our data end up in the cloud, and it’s not just one cloud provider. We get services from a lot of different vendors, all of which are in the cloud. That speaks to the fact we, as CISOs, can no longer directly secure our own information. We are dependent upon third parties to secure our data for us. We can’t simply trust that they are going to adequately secure that information.”
From a healthcare CISO’s perspective, a vendor’s IT and data security practices should be at least as effective as the provider’s security posture, Houston said. “I should expect nothing less. As soon as I expect less, that’s a sign of defeat.”
Across the healthcare industry, ineffective security, compliance and assurance methods drive cost and confusion within organizations and across third parties, according to IT leaders.
While most healthcare organizations are taking the right steps to monitor and screen vendors and their products and services during the pre-selection and on-boarding phases and are also conducting security risk assessments, it’s still not enough to protect IT systems, data, and, most importantly, patients, said Taylor Lehmann, CISO at Wellforce, the Burlington, Mass.-based health system that includes Tufts Medical Center and Floating Hospital for Children. “We are still seeing breaches, and the breaches are still coming after we do all this screening,” he said.
“We’re not being effective and it’s difficult to be effective with the current paradigm,” Houston added.
From the CISO’s perspective, there are inefficiencies in the third-party supply chain ecosystem. Suppliers are commonly required by their customers to respond to unique questionnaires or other assessment requests relating to their risk management posture. Vendors often must fill out questionnaires with 300-plus questions. What’s more, there’s no assurance or audit of the information the vendor provides, and the process is completely inefficient for suppliers who are audited 100 times annually on the same topics, but just different questions, Lehmann and Houston noted. What's more, the security assessment often occurs too late in the process.
“We’re creating a lot of waste; we’re taking time away from our organizations and we’re taking time away from suppliers,” Lehmann said. “The current way we’re doing supply chain risk management, it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t scale, and there is an opportunity to improve.”
To address these issues, a group of CISOs from a number of healthcare organizations established the Provider Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) Initiative to develop a standardized method to assess the risk management posture of third-party suppliers to healthcare firms. Launched this past August, the founding member organizations for the Provider TPRM Council include Allegheny Health Network, Cleveland Clinic, University of Rochester Medical Center, UPMC, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Wellforce/Tufts University. Working with HITRUST and PwC, the Council aims to bring uniformity and consistency to the process while also reducing the burden on providers and third parties.
The healthcare industry, as a whole, will benefit from a common set of information security requirements with a standardized assessment and reporting process, Lehmann noted.
In the past four months, the governing members have been expanded to include Nuance, The Mayo Clinic, Multicare, Indiana University Health, Children’s Health Dallas, Phoenix Children’s Hospital, and Banner Health.
The Provider TPRM initiative is increasing membership and gaining momentum as security leaders from both healthcare providers and their suppliers embrace the unified approach, Lehmann said.
One of the goals for the Council is to address the inefficiencies found in the third-party supply chain ecosystem. By reducing the multiple audits and questionnaires, the financial savings will allow business partners to invest in substantive risk reduction efforts and not redundant assessments, the Council leaders say.
“By reducing wasted effort and duplication, suppliers will find their products and services will be acquired more quickly by healthcare providers. This will also reduce the complexity of contracts and provide third parties with better visibility regarding the requirements to do business with providers,” said Omar Khawaja, VP and CISO of Allegheny Health Network and Highmark Health. Khawaja’s organization is a founding participant and governing member of the Provider TPRM initiative.
As part of this initiative, going forward, provider organizations that join the effort will require third-party vendors to become HITRUST CSF Certified within the next two years, by September 2020. The HITRUST CSF Certification will serve as the standard for third parties providing services where they require access to patient or sensitive information and be accepted by all the Council’s organizations. HITRUST CSF is an industry privacy and security framework that is continuously evolving with the changing cyber landscape.
“After September 1, 2020, third parties without certification cannot do business with participants,” Khawaja said.
Houston added, “We recognize that there are limitations in our current processes, and what we’re putting in place is at least as good or better than what we’re already doing. This will lead to faster onboarding, less waste, better transparency, and simpler compliance.”
By choosing to adopt a single comprehensive assessment and certification program, healthcare organizations represented by the council are prioritizing the safety, care, and privacy of their patients by providing clarity and adopting best practices that their vendors can also adopt, while providing vendors the expectation of what it takes to do business with their organizations.
“It provides transparency,” Houston said “It sends a message to suppliers that we’re an open book about what it takes to do business. That’s powerful.”
Moving forward, the Provider TPRM initiative will focus on adding business associates to the effort to increase membership and impact, Lehmann said. “The simple fact is, many of us are pushing this through our supply chain and there are organizations that may not have a process or low maturity process. But, through the efforts of council members, more suppliers will show up, which is means safer products are possible to purchase.”
Further, the program will likely develop additional requirements on vendors such as breach response and monitoring security threats and alerts observed as third-party vendors.
The Council also plans to focus on certification programs for smaller vendors. “A lot of innovation in healthcare is coming from smaller companies, and we understand there is a gap between what those companies can do with respect to cyber. We’re not lowering our standards, but we want to be thoughtful and create a certification program for those areas. We want to do business and we need a vehicle to bring them in in a safe and secure way,” Lehmann said.
“We want to build a community of health providers working together, business associates working together, to share information,” Lehmann said. “We want to better inform ourselves and align other programs, like cyber insurance, to enable more effective planning throughout the supply chain. The things we learn through these relationships can translate to other aspects of our organizations.”
