New capabilities deliver AI-powered systemic risk intelligence, critical function mapping, rapid inherent risk scoring, and concentration risk visibility.
BOSTON, MA, UNITED STATES, February 23, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Censinet, the leading provider of healthcare risk management solutions, today announced new capabilities in Censinet RiskOps™ that make it the first platform to operationalize the Health Sector Coordinating Council’s (HSCC) Sector Mapping and Risk Toolkit (SMART) framework.
These innovations provide healthcare organizations with automated visibility into which third-party vendors and products pose systemic, concentration, and single-point-of-failure risks across the 17 critical functions that underpin healthcare delivery.
Censinet will demonstrate the new capabilities live at Booth #920 in South Hall at ViVE 2026, February 22–25, at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“The Change Healthcare attack exposed what the industry has long feared but couldn’t see: a single vendor failure can cascade across the entire health sector,” said Ed Gaudet, CEO and Founder of Censinet. “The HSCC SMART framework provided a methodology to identify that risk. Today, Censinet is delivering the technology to operationalize it, automatically mapping which products in a customer’s portfolio touch critical functions in healthcare, scoring inherent risk before the first assessment is ever sent, and identifying the concentration risks and chokepoints that threaten care delivery.”
The Challenge: Systemic Risk Is Invisible at the Organizational Level
Healthcare organizations rely on hundreds to thousands of third-party vendor products, but lack a scalable way to determine which of those products are connected to the critical functions their patients and staff depend on—or where a single vendor disruption could cascade across multiple essential operations. The HSCC SMART Toolkit, published in October 2025 after 16 months of collaboration among more than 80 healthcare organizations, established the industry-standard methodology for mapping and measuring this systemic risk. However, implementing SMART has remained a manual, resource-intensive process that many organizations—particularly rural and community health systems—struggle to undertake.
Censinet’s Approach: Automated SMART at Scale
Censinet’s new capabilities transform HSCC SMART from a manual planning exercise into a continuously updated, intelligence-driven operational capability within the Censinet RiskOps platform. Key innovations include:
• Interactive Critical Function Workflow Visualization: Each of the 17 critical functions is represented as a visual workflow, showing how entities, IT systems, and third-party services connect and depend on one another across clinical and business operations. Censinet automatically populates these diagrams with products and vendors from each customer’s inventory, so organizations see their own risk landscape mapped onto the standard critical function flows from day one. Risk managers, operational leaders, and executives can explore how vendor products flow through claims processing, pharmacy operations, laboratory services, and other critical functions, immediately identifying where dependencies, chokepoints, and convergence risks exist. The diagrams are fully editable: organizations can add, rearrange, and annotate workflow elements to reflect how they actually operate, ensuring the maps evolve from an industry-standard starting point into an accurate representation of each organization’s unique operational reality.
• HSCC Critical Function Mapping. Censinet automatically maps every vendor product in a customer’s portfolio to the 17 HSCC critical functions—including claims and payments, pharmacy operations, clinical laboratory services, diagnostic radiology, blood services, and more—using the Censinet clinical and business process classifier and network intelligence. Organizations see pre-populated SMART maps from day one, with the ability to refine mappings to reflect how they actually use each vendor’s products and services.
• Rapid Inherent Risk Scoring. A new healthcare-specific scoring capability (300–850) provides instant, pre-assessment risk intelligence across every product in a customer’s portfolio. Powered by Censinet’s network intelligence and seven new AI Research Agents, the scoring evaluates 11 deterministic healthcare risk factors—including PHI interaction, EHR connectivity, AI capabilities, cloud hosting, breach history, and peer tiering—to deliver a FICO-style risk score that prioritizes assessment resources by exposure rather than politics.
• Concentration Risk and Chokepoint Visibility. By combining critical function mapping with inherent risk scoring, Censinet surfaces where a single vendor represents convergence risk across one or more critical functions—the exact systemic chokepoints the HSCC SMART framework was designed to identify.
• Network-Powered Intelligence. The Censinet risk exchange of 200+ healthcare organizations and 55,000+ vendors and products creates aggregated, anonymized intelligence that strengthens every score and mapping. When telemetry across the network identifies a product or service with AI capabilities and/or interacting with protected health information (PHI) or touching critical clinical workflows, that network intelligence flows into every customer’s view, even if their own data is incomplete.
“The SMART maps were built on a simple but critical insight: the health sector’s interconnected ecosystem means that a single vendor failure can cascade across critical functions and directly threaten patient care,” said Erik Decker, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Intermountain Health and former Chairman of the HSCC Cybersecurity Working Group. “The challenge has always been operationalizing that insight—moving from understanding the risk conceptually to actually mapping, scoring, and managing it across thousands of vendor products. This type of capability is exactly what the sector needs as our adversaries become increasingly sophisticated at enumerating the connectivity of our ecosystem.”
Value to Healthcare Organizations
For healthcare CISOs, risk managers, and operational leaders, Censinet’s systemic risk capabilities deliver:
• Day-one portfolio visibility. New customers receive a fully scored, prioritized product inventory the moment they onboard—no assessments required. The systemic risk dashboard shows where risk concentrates across critical functions immediately.
• Intelligence-driven triage. Risk teams instantly identify which products deserve deep assessment, stronger intake requirements, or stricter guardrails—replacing assessment queues driven by politics rather than risk.
• Board-ready risk communication. FICO-style scores and executive dashboards provide a common language for boards and executive leadership. Systemic risk is communicated in clinical and operational terms, focused on which critical functions are exposed and where concentration risk exists.
• Business continuity and resilience planning. Automated mapping of vendors and products to business and clinical processes provide visual, actionable insight into dependencies, enabling response planning around specific vendor failure scenarios.
• Regulatory readiness. As HHS, and boards intensify scrutiny of third-party concentration risk, mapped and risk-scored vendor inventories position organizations to meet evolving compliance mandates with confidence.
Healthcare organizations interested in learning more about the Censinet Systemic Risk and SMART-mapping capabilities should visit Booth #920 in South Hall at ViVE 2026 or contact info@censinet.com.
About Censinet
Censinet®, based in Boston, MA, takes the risk out of healthcare with Censinet RiskOps™, the industry’s first and only cloud-based risk exchange of healthcare organizations working together to manage and mitigate cyber risk. Purpose-built for healthcare, Censinet RiskOps delivers total automation across all third-party and enterprise risk management workflows and best practices. Censinet transforms cyber risk management by leveraging network scale and efficiencies, providing actionable insight, and improving overall operational effectiveness while eliminating risks to patient safety, data, and care delivery. Censinet is an American Hospital Association (AHA) Preferred Cybersecurity Provider. Find out more about Censinet and its RiskOps platform at censinet.com.
About the HSCC SMART Framework
The Health Industry Cybersecurity Sector Mapping and Risk Toolkit (SMART) was published in October 2025 by the Cybersecurity Working Group of the Health Sector Coordinating Council (HSCC), a government-recognized critical-infrastructure industry advisory council of more than 480 healthcare organizations. Developed through 16 months of cross-sector collaboration among 80 organizations, the SMART Toolkit provides templates and a methodology to visualize, identify, and measure systemic risk posed by third-party technology, software, and communications services essential to clinical, administrative, and manufacturing workflows. Learn more at HealthSectorCouncil.org.
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Rita Labrado
Censinet
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