Everything You Need to Know About the HITRUST MyCSF Enhancements

HITRUST is continuously working to improve the user experience within the MyCSF tool to ensure both assessors and clients are able to go through the HITRUST certification process as efficiently and with as much transparency as possible. In their latest advisory, HITRUST announced five new enhancements to the HITRUST MyCSF tool. 

“The newly introduced functionality allows us to better serve our clients and for our clients to have a more clear picture of where they stand in the certification process,” said Steve Ryan, Senior HITRUST Consultant at BARR Advisory. “These enhancements will improve the overall experience of organizations going through the HITRUST process.”

These enhancements will be automatically implemented for all r2 Validated Assessments and r2 Readiness Assessments by October 1, 2022. For organizations that already have a HITRUST r2 Certification, these enhancements won’t affect them until they go through their next validation. It’s imperative that these organizations work with their assessors to stay on top of the changes to make sure there are no headaches or unexpected delays that occur with these enhancements. 

Let’s take a closer look at what these enhancements are and how they impact your HITRUST assessment. 

Enhancement 1: New Assessment Workflows

The new assessment workflow is comprised of 16 workflow phases. The phases are more granularly defined to increase the transparency regarding assessment status and the remaining outstanding items needed to reach the next phase. The phases do not add additional steps to the process, but rather clarify the steps that must be completed by each party during the assessment. The HITRUST website includes a great table that outlines each phase, description of the phase, and key changes that have been made. 

“This enhancement adds an incredible level of transparency into the HITRUST process,” said Ryan. 

Enhancement 2: Status Dashboards 

This enhancement to MyCSF introduces several status dashboards to provide transparency with assessment statuses, open action items, and next steps in the workflow. These dashboards include several different view options, including a kanban view, a matrix view, and an assessment details view. Each view includes several necessary details regarding the assessment. 

“These dashboards certainly are targeted towards the external assessors, but have the potential to be incredibly beneficial to large organizations that may have more than one HITRUST validation in progress,” explained Ryan. 

Enhancement 3: Web Forms

The new web forms give assessed entities and their external assessors the ability to enter organization and scope information directly into MyCSF, electronically sign key documents, and easily request draft report revisions. 

Prior to the enhancement, this was a manual process that resulted in back and forth emails with the organization to edit a PDF document as needed. Now, everything is stored within the tool, allowing for more efficiency.

Enhancement 4: Tasks and Notifications

This enhancement allows for greater efficiency in the Quality Assurance (QA) process by again having everything stored in one place within the tool. The tasks in MyCSF give assessed entities and their authorized assessors the ability to track and respond to any questions from HITRUST that arose during the QA process. 

Enhancement 5:  HITRUST Report Format Changes 

This enhancement introduced several changes to the format of the HITRUST report to streamline and clarify the presentation of information within the report. These enhancements do not require action from the Assessed Entity, but rather provide them with a much cleaner and easier to read report. 

Any organizations currently working on their HITRUST assessment should check in with their Authorized External Assessor to ensure they are aware of these enhancements and prepared to upload documents to HITRUST in a slightly different order. This will prevent any potential delays or headaches during submission. 

“I’m incredibly excited about these enhancements as they have already streamlined a few of my clients’ projects and added some great efficiencies. I’m looking forward to what HITRUST has in store for us next to continue to enhance both Authorized External Assessors and organizations going through the HITRUST process,” said Ryan. 

Interested in learning more about HITRUST? Contact us today.