Healthcare organizations work with a broad range of service organizations, allowing experts to manage tasks outside their essential goals of managing patient care. When outsourcing tasks, a healthcare organization cannot rely solely on trust since confidential information, such as protected health information (PHI) and other internal records, becomes shared property with shared responsibilities to different parties.
Service organizations must comply with all the same privacy regulations that the health organization maintains to protect data, patients, stakeholders, and the organization’s reputation.
The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) has developed and maintained a suite of protective controls for all sectors and their respective service organizations. With Systems and Organizational Controls (SOC) Type 2 for healthcare, there is an existing set of voluntary but essential standards to ensure that service organizations align with health organizations to protect everyone’s interests, including their own.
Please continue reading this guide to learn how SOC audit training has become a critical component in fortifying data protection mechanisms for service organizations.
The Essentials of SOC 2 Training Requirements
Today’s healthcare organizations must continually seek means of enhancing regulatory compliance and data security frameworks. Facing 553 cybersecurity threats in 2023 alone, health systems are frequent targets of hacking incidents and unauthorized access to health records and other confidential data.
SOC 2 training equips healthcare service organizations with the skills necessary to adopt, implement, and maintain powerful security measures in compliance with SOC 2 standards for documentation and more.
SOC Type 2 establishes standards to protect organizations against unauthorized access and data breaches, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of protected health information (PHI).
Proper SOC 2 training provides the fundamental knowledge required to understand, meet, and maintain these crucial standards.
The pivotal aspect of SOC 2 certification training consists of the Five Trust Service Principles:
- Security. Protecting information and security systems against unauthorized access or disclosure of information. Security also consists of protecting against system damage that may compromise the other trust criteria: availability, integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
- Availability. Ensuring that the client entity maintains continuous access to information and systems for operations.
- Processing Integrity. Guaranteeing that health organizations can rely on complete, valid, accurate, timely, and authorized system processing to meet objectives.
- Confidentiality. Protecting healthcare entity’s confidential information.
- Privacy. Safeguarding collected, used, retained, disclosed, and disposed of personal information to meet the healthcare entity’s objectives and protect privacy.
The Path to SOC 2 Certification Training
SOC 2 training is a vital step for healthcare organizations and their service organizations to take to ensure SOC 2 compliance and all the benefits it yields. This specialized training prepares your team for the audit process, offering insights into the document requirements, the evaluation of internal controls, and the best practices for demonstrating compliance with SOC 2 criteria.
Participating in SOC 2 audit training ensures that the healthcare and service organizations are aligned and that the service organization is well-prepared and positioned to meet the SOC 2 auditor’s expectations. Taking this step facilitates a smoother audit process and better results for everyone.
Are You Ready to Embark on SOC 2 Certification Training?
At Compliancy Group, we offer a broad range of SOC 2 readiness guides and strategies. Our SOC training covers topics including risk management strategies, implementation of effective controls, and ongoing compliance monitoring.
SOC 2 certification training is critically important for healthcare organizations and service organizations to demonstrate their shared commitment to data security. It offers patients proof of your dedication to their protection, gives you a competitive edge in the industry, and elevates your organization among industry peers and the public.
Get in touch with us to learn more about our SOC 2 certification training and other ways you can protect your healthcare organization.
