New cybersecurity readiness assessment for healthcare organizations

KLAS, a healthcare research and insights firm, and Censinet announced a partnership to help healthcare IT vendors and services firms improve their overall risk and security profile and provide greater transparency to thousands of healthcare providers. As part of the partnership, KLAS, which has conducted deep research and analysis on more than 900 healthcare IT products and services, will introduce a new Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment.

The partnership will also include collaborative research, insight sharing, special report access, and cybersecurity best practices, arming healthcare decision makers with vital information to improve their cybersecurity posture and ultimately, foster a more secure and productive healthcare ecosystem.

“More than ever, providers and payers rely on vendors to deliver highly secure and resilient products and services... to communicate a level of security transparency and confidence to providers and payers with better decision making,” says Adam Gale, President of KLAS.

While the massive undertaking to implement electronic health records over the past decade has spurred an era of digital health innovation, it has also greatly expanded the attack surface for cyber criminals to target healthcare organizations. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has both increased reliance on digital health and given attackers even more incentive to target providers, payers and others in the healthcare industry.

The new Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment aims to help healthcare leaders uncover risks in IT vendor and services solutions. Instead of the months-long and resource-intensive process typically required to assess security concerns of new healthcare technology, these new ratings immediately give providers the confidence they need to make decisions quickly. Technology that has not yet been assessed can be vetted in as little as 10 days.

KLAS and Censinet are hosting a series of healthcare vendor webinars describing the process and benefits of participation over the coming weeks. All vendors and service firms that KLAS currently measures will have the opportunity to report on their cybersecurity preparedness. After engaging in a webinar, links to assessments will be provided to participating vendors. Participation does not require a membership to KLAS and is offered to vendors at no cost.