Third parties are required for your company. They are your suppliers, vendors, contractors, and partners. You can only perform business with them. Third parties offer cloud-based services, storing sensitive data and offering other vital services. Healthcare companies can find it tough to manage third party risk assessment to avoid any possible security breaches.
The HIPAA and OCR statistics reported that hacking or IT incidents are the major cause behind every significant data breach. About 4371 healthcare data breaches have endangered 287.7 million people between 2010 and 2021, with an average of 3343448 healthcare records that were breached.
If your healthcare organization’s supply chain involves risks impacting patient care, critical services, or PHI data, these are the subsequent security breaches, too. Therefore, let us now examine the varied aspects of third-party vendor risk management programs, how they work, and the approaches to undertake that meet the industry’s best practices.
What is TPRM?
Third party risk management, also considered as TPRM, is the procedure involved with vetting the vendors to help you understand the risks they impose on the company and the supply chain. Companies with robust vendor risk management programs are notably involved with the identification, assessment, and mitigation of the threats to the data and assets caused due to the supply chain of the company.
Numerous companies can perform business with numerous third parties, and these third parties fill different roles. A few might be the vendors; however, the rest fall under numerous categories like contractors, partners, and consultants. Consequently, TPRM is the umbrella covering vendor risk management along with the other different forms of third-party risk management involving IT vendor risk, supplier risk management, ABAC or anti-bribery or anti-corruption compliance, and contract risk management.
Best Practices For Third-Party Risk Management in Healthcare
The following are the best practices that you should follow to boost your efforts to third-party continuous monitoring in the digital health industry:
Identify Your Third-Parties
Before scaling about the kind of risk involved, you should recognize all your third parties’ understanding about the amount of data getting shared.
It is always a challenging undertaking. A few of the bigger vendors, like the cloud providers, are the prominent third parties with a couple of departments who work with their third parties since they have yet to share their list of vendors with the rest of the departments. They might not consider a couple of contractors like the third-party vendors so that you are working in the same line with every department in creating a list.
After you consider who the vendors are, it is essential to know about the networks and data they are accessing. Will they require the amount of privilege they possess? Here, you need to pose a few restrictions.
Emphasizing Your Vendors
Not every vendor possesses the same skills or poses the same risks to your assets. Vendors handling complex business processes often pose significant threats to the data compared to contractors working with a single department. You need to check out the third parties representing a serious threat to your company. The risk ratings are a tool that can help you do this.
Automating The Processes
Whenever things arrive at minimizing third-party risk, due diligence is both labor-intensive and a tough job. Bigger companies are often dealing with numerous third parties that range from the cloud vendors serving the whole company to the contractors that are working across a single department. It is a tough job to keep track of the numerous companies that are using their spreadsheets and the rest of the manual tools for tracking TPRM.
Collecting Consistent Data
The automated tools can help resolve the different issues related to the questionnaire. Whenever they are presented with the questionnaire, the third parties you are opting for are answering the question differently.
A few might take a narrative approach to answering the questions, whereas a few might answer yes or no, and a few would often start attaching screenshots. Those dealing with varied forms of data are complex at storing or understanding since, in numerous instances, you might not compare apples to apples. Nor can a tool automate these processes with different forms of data with someone who is manually reviewing them.
Continuous Vendor Monitoring
The surveys and the questionnaires represent a single moment in time. These are the static tools offering snapshots of the security posture of the vendors; however, it is only part of the picture. In numerous instances, there is no other way to verify the preciseness of the questionnaires, as you can accept the words of the third party since they are compliant.
Tools enable you to constantly monitor the posture of security of vendors, as these issues are often avoidable. You can get the right notification whenever a vendor is falling out of compliance while scanning for issues related to the vendor, like the Amazon Web Services bucket that is configured in the wrong way, chattering across the dark web regarding the breached assets or other assets that are often unsecured.
Conclusion
The risk imposed by third-party vendors can always be noticed since you can manage it. It is essential whenever you require reliance on your third parties. To minimize the administrative effort and time spent managing third-party relationships, it is essential to consider intelligent tools that automate the parts involved with third-party processes.