The Challenge
A rapidly growing urgent care provider processing over two million patient visits annually faced a strategic imperative: major health system partners and commercial payers required HITRUST r2 Certification as a prerequisite for expanded data-sharing agreements. The organization had no existing compliance programme, a heterogeneous IT environment spanning on-premise EHR systems and cloud-hosted ancillary applications, and a 6-month window to achieve certification before a critical contract renewal.
Our Approach
Cloudrho embedded a dedicated compliance and cloud security team within the client’s IT organization from day one. The engagement opened with a 3-week gap assessment against the HITRUST CSF r2 control requirements, mapping 219 applicable controls to existing policy, technical, and operational evidence. The gap analysis identified 74 controls requiring remediation — classified by risk severity and estimated implementation effort.
Cloudrho prioritized high-risk gaps first: endpoint detection and response deployment across 1,200 workstations, privileged access management implementation, encryption at rest for all PHI data stores, and network segmentation to isolate clinical systems. Policy and procedure documentation was built using Cloudrho’s HITRUST-aligned template library, accelerating artefact production by 60% versus a ground-up approach.
In months four and five, Cloudrho conducted two rounds of internal readiness assessments simulating the HITRUST validated assessment process, closing 11 residual findings before the external assessor engagement. Cloudrho liaised directly with the assessor firm to ensure evidence packages were complete and formatted to specification.
Business Outcomes
The certification was achieved on its first submission with zero corrective action plans — an exceptional outcome that the assessor cited as among the smoothest engagements in their review cycle. The client subsequently renewed and expanded two major health system data-sharing agreements.