HIPAA vs. HITRUST: Key Differences and How HITRUST Helps with HIPAA

What is HIPAA? 

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a U.S. law enacted in 1996 to provide data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information. Administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), HIPAA sets national standards for the protection of health information. It applies to health plans, healthcare clearinghouses, and healthcare providers conducting certain transactions electronically.

HIPAA’s primary goals are to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of protected health information (PHI). The law has widespread implications, affecting how healthcare organizations store, access, and share health data. HIPAA compliance is mandatory and failing to comply can result in significant penalties and fines.

What is HITRUST? 

The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) is an organization that creates and manages a certifiable framework for healthcare data protection. Launched in 2007, the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF) integrates various regulations and standards, including HIPAA, NIST, PCI, and ISO, to provide a scalable, prescriptive, certifiable framework. HITRUST aims to simplify regulatory compliance and reduce risk within the healthcare industry.

HITRUST CSF is widely adopted, and organizations that achieve HITRUST certification often gain credibility and operational efficiency. The framework offers guidelines and best practices, ensuring that organizations meet security and privacy requirements. Achieving HITRUST certification involves rigorous evaluation and assessment, demonstrating an organization’s commitment to data security.FERPA mandates that schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student to release any information from a student’s education record. However, there are some exceptions where schools can disclose records without consent, such as to school officials with legitimate educational interests or in response to a subpoena.

Tips from the expert

Steve Moore is Vice President and Chief Security Strategist at Exabeam, helping drive solutions for threat detection and advising customers on security programs and breach response. He is the host of the “The New CISO Podcast,” a Forbes Tech Council member, and Co-founder of TEN18 at Exabeam.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you leverage HITRUST to better comply with HIPAA:

Leverage HITRUST’s risk-based approach for proactive security: Use HITRUST’s detailed risk management practices to go beyond basic HIPAA compliance. Proactively identify potential threats, and align your security posture to reduce the risk of breaches before they happen.

Utilize HITRUST to bridge multiple compliance requirements: If your organization needs to comply with various regulations (e.g., PCI-DSS, GDPR, or ISO 27001), use HITRUST as a unifying framework. This can reduce redundancy and streamline compliance efforts across different regulatory landscapes.

Implement layered security controls through HITRUST’s maturity model: HITRUST’s CSF includes a maturity model that helps assess the effectiveness of your security controls over time. Use this model to ensure that your controls aren’t just in place but are evolving and improving continuously, enhancing your HIPAA compliance.

Incorporate HITRUST in vendor risk management: Require vendors handling PHI to attain HITRUST certification. This not only ensures they meet high standards but also reduces the compliance burden on your organization by extending security controls across the supply chain.

Streamline incident response with HITRUST’s prescriptive guidance: While HIPAA mandates incident response plans, HITRUST provides more detailed and actionable guidance. Adopt HITRUST’s approach to refine your incident response protocols, making them more effective and timely.

Similarities Between HITRUST and HIPAA 

Both HITRUST and HIPAA aim to protect sensitive health information, ensuring its confidentiality, integrity, and availability. They share several key similarities:

1. Focus on data security and privacy: Both frameworks emphasize the importance of safeguarding protected health information (PHI). They set guidelines and standards to ensure that PHI is handled securely and that privacy is maintained.
2. Risk management: Both HIPAA and HITRUST emphasize risk management. HIPAA requires covered entities to conduct risk assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities, while HITRUST provides a structured approach for risk assessment and management, ensuring continuous improvement in security practices.
3. Organizational accountability: HIPAA and HITRUST both require organizations to implement administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect health information. This includes policies and procedures, workforce training, and the use of technology to secure data.
4. Audit and assessment: Although HIPAA compliance is enforced through audits by regulatory bodies, and HITRUST through a certifiable process, both frameworks involve periodic assessments to ensure that organizations adhere to the required standards and practices.

HIPAA vs. HITRUST: The Key Differences

Purpose and Scope

HIPAA is a federal law establishing national standards for protecting health information, while HITRUST offers a framework that integrates multiple regulations and standards, including HIPAA. HIPAA mandates are statutory requirements, whereas HITRUST CSF is a voluntary, certifiable framework offering implementation guidelines and best practices.

HIPAA’s scope is limited to regulated entities like healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses. HITRUST, on the other hand, is adaptable for a broader range of organizations, including those outside the traditional healthcare sector. This flexibility allows HITRUST to provide a more extensive approach to data security.

Coverage and Flexibility

HIPAA sets minimal requirements for compliance, focusing primarily on safeguarding PHI. It mandates that organizations take measures to ensure data protection but leaves implementation details up to the entities. In contrast, HITRUST CSF offers a more detailed and prescriptive approach, integrating various regulatory and industry standards into a singular framework.

HITRUST allows for customization based on organizational size, complexity, and risk profile. This enables businesses to align their compliance efforts with other frameworks like NIST or ISO while covering HIPAA requirements. As such, HITRUST CSF often provides a more tailored solution for data protection.

Regulatory vs. Certifiable Framework

HIPAA is a regulatory requirement, meaning compliance is enforced by government agencies, and failure to adhere can lead to legal penalties. It sets the baseline for healthcare data protection but does not offer certification. Entities must demonstrate compliance primarily through internal audits and documentation.

HITRUST CSF is a certifiable framework, offering formal recognition through a rigorous assessment and certification process. Achieving HITRUST certification can help an organization comply with HIPAA and other standards, and also enhance an organization’s credibility, demonstrating its commitment to stringent data protection standards.

Implementation Requirements

HIPAA guidelines are less specific, giving organizations discretion in how they achieve compliance. It outlines necessary safeguards but allows covered entities to determine the specifics based on their risk assessments. This can lead to variability in the implementation of security measures.

HITRUST provides more detailed guidelines within its CSF, offering steps to meet each control requirement. This approach helps organizations avoid ambiguity and ensures a consistent level of security across all entities. The HITRUST CSF also includes a scoring system to evaluate compliance levels, aiding organizations in identifying areas for improvement.

Audit and Certification

HIPAA does not require certification but allows for audits by regulatory bodies such as the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Audits can be triggered by complaints, breach reports, or at random, assessing an organization’s compliance with HIPAA rules. Penalties for non-compliance can be severe, including fines and corrective action plans.

HITRUST includes a certification process based on an independent third-party assessment. Organizations undergo an annual review to maintain their HITRUST certification, involving a detailed evaluation of their security controls and practices. The certification process is rigorous, providing stakeholders with confidence in an entity’s data security capabilities.

When You Need to Be HIPAA Compliant and How HITRUST Can Help 

When You Need to Be HIPAA Compliant

HIPAA compliance is mandatory for all entities that handle protected health information (PHI). This includes healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses. Additionally, business associates of these entities—such as billing companies, cloud service providers, and other third-party vendors—must also comply with HIPAA regulations if they manage, store, or process PHI.

Compliance is required when:

• Conducting electronic transactions: Any electronic exchange of health information, such as billing or claims, falls under HIPAA regulations.
• Providing healthcare services: Doctors, hospitals, and clinics must ensure PHI is protected in all forms of communication and storage.
• Handling health insurance: Health plans and insurers must secure PHI during enrollment, claims processing, and other related activities.
• Partnering with business associates: Contracts with third-party service providers must include provisions to ensure HIPAA compliance.

Non-compliance can lead to significant fines, legal penalties, and reputational damage. Therefore, it’s crucial for any entity dealing with PHI to understand and implement HIPAA’s requirements.

How HITRUST Can Help

HITRUST CSF can assist organizations in achieving and maintaining HIPAA compliance by providing a comprehensive framework that incorporates HIPAA’s requirements alongside other security standards. Here’s how HITRUST facilitates HIPAA compliance:

• Consolidated controls: HITRUST CSF integrates various regulatory requirements, including those of HIPAA, into a unified framework. This reduces the complexity of managing multiple compliance obligations.
• Prescriptive guidance: Unlike HIPAA’s broader guidelines, HITRUST offers detailed control specifications. This clarity helps organizations implement the necessary safeguards effectively and consistently.
• Risk management: HITRUST emphasizes continuous risk assessment and management, aligning with HIPAA’s requirement for regular risk analysis. It provides tools and methodologies to identify, assess, and mitigate risks.
• Certification: Achieving HITRUST certification demonstrates that an organization has met stringent security standards. This certification can serve as proof of compliance during HIPAA audits, providing assurance to regulators and business partners.
• Continuous improvement: The HITRUST framework supports ongoing evaluation and enhancement of security practices, ensuring organizations remain compliant as regulations evolve.

By adopting HITRUST CSF, organizations can streamline their compliance efforts, reduce the risk of breaches, and maintain robust data protection practices in line with HIPAA requirements.

HIPAA Compliance with Exabeam

Noncompliance with HIPAA can result in heavy fines from OCR and other consequences. When patch management, access controls, and monitoring are not fully implemented with the right solution stack, it leaves the organization vulnerable to ransomware and other attack vectors that can impact patient care. 

Exabeam Security Operations Platform telemetry combines logs with context, security intelligence feeds, and AI analysis to identify anomalous behaviors that indicate potential attacks. Pre-built Dashboards make HIPAA Compliance reporting easier. Whether you are using a framework like NIST or MITRE ATT&CK^Ⓡ, Exabeam offers a clear path to track your compliance and governance request needs — while all establishing what normal looks like in your environment and for every entity logged in. 

The Outcomes Navigator offers continuous visualization and insight into your detection coverage and improvements made, which provides suggestions for improvements in log parsing as well as showing which sources and detections are most effective against which parts of the ATT&CK framework and use cases are most indicative of network penetration, persistence, and lateral movement.