A Thirdsentry Industry Insight for Healthcare Security and Compliance Leaders
Healthcare organizations manage hundreds of vendor relationships that touch protected health information — from revenue cycle management companies and cloud EHR hosts to billing processors and telehealth platforms. Seventy-two percent of healthcare data breaches now trace back to third-party vendors, and between 2024 and 2025, 275 million patient records were exposed through these relationships — a 63.5% increase over the prior period.
OCR's Risk Analysis Initiative has produced ten enforcement actions in under twelve months, each one targeting organizations that failed to conduct adequate security risk assessments of the systems and vendors handling their ePHI.
"The proposed HIPAA Security Rule update goes further: covered entities would need to obtain written verification from every business associate, at least annually, that technical safeguards have been deployed and independently validated."
For any healthcare organization still running TPRM on spreadsheets and annual review cycles, the message from HHS is unambiguous — periodic compliance gestures no longer meet the standard of care.
Most health systems already own a GRC platform. The challenge is not the absence of a risk register — it is the operational gap between recording risk and resolving it. GRC modules can catalog vendors, store questionnaires, and generate dashboards. What they consistently fail to do is execute: validate the evidence a vendor submits, chase non-responsive vendors through remediation, and close findings on a timeline that regulators and auditors actually expect.
The result is predictable. Assessments stall in manual evidence review. Remediation items sit open for months because no one owns the follow-up. Annual reassessment cycles mean that a vendor's security posture can deteriorate for 364 days before anyone notices.
"Sixty-eight percent of HIPAA-covered entities and 79% of business associates report inefficiencies in their current risk management systems."
In healthcare, where OCR can arrive with an audit letter at any time and where a single business associate breach can cascade across an entire client base, this operational gap is not a process annoyance — it is a regulatory and clinical liability.
The distinction between a TPRM module inside a GRC platform and a TPRM execution engine is the difference between a system that documents risk and one that drives risk to resolution. Thirdsentry was built specifically to close this gap — not to replace the GRC platform, but to own the operational workload that GRC tools were never designed to carry.
Thirdsentry's AI-first engine automates questionnaire generation, ingests vendor responses, and produces risk scores in hours rather than the weeks typical of manual review cycles. This is not a marginal efficiency gain. It is the difference between assessing 40 vendors a year and covering 200 — the kind of throughput shift that brings an organization's actual coverage in line with its real vendor footprint.
Accepting a vendor's self-attestation at face value is the single most common failure point in healthcare TPRM. Thirdsentry validates submitted evidence against the claims made in questionnaire responses, flagging discrepancies and incomplete documentation before an assessment is marked complete — so the risk team acts on verified information, not vendor narratives.
Open findings are where most TPRM programs quietly fail. Thirdsentry manages the remediation workflow end to end: outreach to the vendor, progress tracking against defined timelines, escalation when deadlines pass, and verification that corrective actions have actually been implemented. Whether an organization leverages the platform's automation or Thirdsentry's fully managed service — where dedicated analysts own validation, vendor outreach, remediation, and board-ready reporting — the outcome is the same: findings move to closure instead of aging in a backlog.
Rather than relying on point-in-time assessments, Thirdsentry surfaces meaningful risk signals on an ongoing basis through live monitoring and automated alerts, ensuring that a vendor's deteriorating security posture is detected when it changes — not twelve months later during the next scheduled review.
The return from a TPRM execution engine is not theoretical. It is measured in capacity relief: a lean vendor risk team that can now cover the full vendor portfolio instead of triaging only the top tier. It is measured in audit readiness: the ability to produce validated, current evidence of vendor oversight the day OCR requests it, rather than scrambling through email threads and outdated spreadsheets. And it is measured in broader coverage: extending assessments to the mid-tier and long-tail vendors that account for a growing share of PHI exposure but have historically been deprioritized because the team simply lacked bandwidth.
This approach fits healthcare organizations that already have a GRC platform and a defined risk framework, but whose vendor risk execution has stalled — assessments incomplete, remediation aging, coverage limited to a fraction of the vendor population.
It is not a fit for organizations that have not yet established basic vendor governance or a risk taxonomy. GRC remains the system of record for policy, risk appetite, and enterprise reporting. Thirdsentry is the execution layer that turns those policies into completed assessments, validated evidence, and closed findings.
"Healthcare TPRM fails not because organizations lack frameworks or GRC software, but because no one owns the operational execution — the assessments, the evidence validation, the remediation follow-through, the continuous monitoring."
Thirdsentry exists to carry that execution workload, whether through AI-driven platform automation or fully managed analyst-led service, so that GRC tools can do what they were designed for — govern — while actual vendor risk gets driven to resolution. That is why healthcare organizations pair Thirdsentry with their GRC platform rather than replacing it: governance without execution is documentation, not risk management.