Today’s healthcare organizations must balance extremely complex risks and demands to protect patient data and have a compliant organization.
Nowaday’s hazard landscape includes a number of areas that can continue to erode compliance from evolving ransomware threats to intentional or unintentional data breaches that violate HIPAA or other regulations, compliance is no longer a yearly checklist, it is a continuous, organization-wide effort.
Compliance, security, and IT leaders no longer ask “Are we compliant today?” Instead, they ask “How do we keep our compliance in a real-time environment as we grow and evolve?”
ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) will help healthcare organizations move from a reactive compliance perspective to proactive, real-time risk management, which will improve workflows, reduce manual work, and ensure compliance tasks are not forgotten.
How ServiceNow GRC Enables Real-Time HIPAA Compliance
Key Takeaways
1. Active Tracking for HIPAA Controls
ServiceNow provides the ability to assess the effectiveness of HIPAA controls in real time, rather than solely relying on manual monitoring or episodic audits. This positive step toward active compliance allows for immediate identification of legitimate issues as they arise, giving an organization maximum opportunity for remediation, before a fine or reputational damage is realized.
Controls can have framework mappings to other standards (NIST or HITRUST, for example), thereby facilitating industry standards and providing near continual visibility into compliance status.
2. Automating Attestations and Training
One of the primary HIPAA requirements is to have ongoing training and active policy review for staff. However, keeping track of attestations on compliance in a multi-department organization has historically been an overwhelming task requiring manual tracking. ServiceNow allows for full scale automation of the entire process of attestation, conducting policy pushes to employees, tracking employee acknowledgement, and creating reminders for retraining.
This functionally ensures all staff-clinical teams to IT resources are always aligned with organizational HIPAA policies, and intuitively aware of their responsibilities to ensure protection of patient information.
3. Centralized Compliance Documentation
No more panicking in anticipation of an audit for search for evidence. ServiceNow allows an organization to have a single, secure repository of all compliance documentation – including risk assessments, audit trails, control test results, and remediation actions.
Centralizing compliance documentation improves audit readiness and facilitates continued collaboration across compliance, risk, and IT functions.
4. Role-Based Dashboards for Clarity and Accountability
Different stakeholders need different insight. ServiceNow‘s role-based dashboards provide timely, tailored visibility into compliance metrics for stakeholders. For instance, compliance officers use the dashboards to track control effectiveness, IT uses it to identify incidents and remediations, and leadership gets the current risk posture and trends in one place.
Bringing this visibility across the organization improves accountability and expedites decision-making.
5. Intelligent Workflow Automation
When a risk or issue is identified, response time is critical. ServiceNow automates workflows for risk – by routing issues to the appropriate teams, tracking unresolved risk escalation and remediation, and providing users a full audit trail of status updates.
This helps reduce manual errors, increases speed to resolve and ensures compliance gaps are closed timely and transparently.
Fostering a Culture of Compliance and Risk Awareness
In the best environments, compliance is not simply about covering bases; instead, compliance is about establishing a culture of privacy, security and accountability as part and parcel of day-to-day operations. ServiceNow GRC allows organizations to layer compliance into operational workflows, alleviating the burden on personnel and moving into a state of resilience over reactivity.
The resulting benefits:
- Fewer surprises during audits
- Greater transparency across the enterprise
- More collaborative efforts across compliance, IT, and security functions
- And ultimately, a safer care environment for patients
Looking to Strengthen HIPAA Compliance with GRC?
Email contactus@apnconsultinginc.com to explore how we help healthcare organizations implement real-time HIPAA compliance frameworks using ServiceNow GRC.