HEALTHCARE · CYBERSECURITY & COMPLIANCE
Independent governance, oversight, and managed technology services for the health systems being actively targeted, and the compliance programs that have to hold up when the breach hits.
THE HEALTHCARE CYBER REALITY
Healthcare is the most-attacked sector in the United States. Change Healthcare. Ascension. Lurie Children’s. The attacks keep landing because the attack surface keeps growing: EHR, HIE, connected medical devices, third-party vendors, ambient AI scribes, telehealth platforms, payment systems. HIPAA Security Rule, HITRUST, 42 CFR Part 2, and state breach notification law all set the floor, and none of them guarantee the outcome. Tools alone do not solve this. Governance does.
Sentinel Solutions Group makes sure those decisions land in your favor, whether you are a mid-market hospital without a CISO or a health system rebuilding after a breach. We do not sell the technology. We govern the decisions around it.
725+
major healthcare data breaches reported to HHS in 2023 (OCR)
$10.93M
average cost of a healthcare data breach (IBM, 2023)
133M
U.S. health records exposed in 2023 (HIPAA Journal)
CHALLENGE
Healthcare organizations are managing simultaneous cybersecurity pressures (HIPAA Security Rule enforcement, HITRUST certification, third-party risk, ransomware response readiness, medical device security, cyber insurance underwriting) while vendors compete to sell point solutions that leave gaps between them. Security leaders and executive sponsors rarely have an independent technical voice in the room that is not tied to a product sale. Sentinel fills that gap: practitioner-led advisory, vendor-neutral evaluation, and program governance built by people who understand healthcare operations, not just cybersecurity tools.
THE CHALLENGES
CMOs, CMIOs, and IT directors are navigating a landscape that punishes the wrong technology decision and rewards the right one. These are the pressures we help hospitals manage.
Security Rule compliance is the floor. Post-Change-Healthcare, HHS OCR enforcement has real teeth. HITRUST certification is increasingly a contractual requirement, and it is not a checkbox exercise.
It is not if, it is when. Runbooks, tabletop exercises, restore testing, and BCDR that actually works under attack are the difference between a week-long incident and a year-long crisis.
Business associates, connected devices, and SaaS vendors account for an increasing share of breaches. BAA governance, vendor risk tiers, and device network segmentation need discipline most hospitals do not have.
SaaS pricing escalation, proprietary data formats, hidden integration fees, and vague SLAs are baked into most public-safety vendor contracts. Without independent scrutiny, hospitals sign deals that punish them at every renewal.
Patient safety and clinical outcomes depend on data flowing across EHR, HIE, lab, pharmacy, imaging, and revenue cycle systems, and with regional hospitals, state HIEs, public health agencies, and payers. Most hospitals still struggle with basic interoperability.
New technology only works if nurses, physicians, and clinical staff actually use it. Recruiting, training, and change management are as critical as the platform itself, and they are routinely under-budgeted in modernization programs.
OUR APPROACH
Sentinel was built by people who came up inside healthcare and the technology that supports it. Our team brings decades of bedside, administrative, and engineering experience across the largest health systems in the region, then trained clinicians on technology, workflow, and process. Our advisory board includes practicing clinicians and leaders (nurses, physicians, and clinical directors) who have served everywhere from agriculture country to the largest metro departments. That lived experience shapes every recommendation we make.
We understand the operational reality of healthcare because we have lived it. Our team knows what clinicians need at 2 a.m., and we know how to translate that into the procurement, governance, and contract language that protects the hospital long after.
We have built, sold, and deployed the EHR, HIE, clinical applications, and clinical documentation platforms healthcare organizations are evaluating. We know the contract language, the hidden SKUs, the integration gotchas, and the renewal traps that vendors do not advertise.
Our co-founder served as a Principal Systems Engineer overseeing some of the most complex healthcare IT environments in the country, and our advisory board adds decades of additional engineering depth across HIPAA, networks, infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
You do not get a single consultant, you get the full bench. Our advisory board of practicing clinicians, nursing leaders, and healthcare IT veterans is actively involved in every engagement, tailored to your specific program. Sentinel is one of the only firms that brings both deep technical expertise and operational breadth directly tied to mission-critical clinical operations.
Most consultancies frame the work as picking the right vendor. Sentinel frames it as governing the healthcare cybersecurity and compliance program, not the platform. The vendors come and go. The contracts get rewritten. The audit cycle never stops. Someone needs to be accountable to the organization, not to the next sales target.
That is the work Sentinel does. We sit on the organization side of the table, every meeting, every decision, every cycle. No resale margin. No referral fees. No commissions on the contracts we recommend. The only loyalty is to the operation.
We govern the program. We never sell the platforms.
A healthcare cybersecurity program operates against a sustained adversary in a regulated environment with patient safety implications. The technology decisions made today determine whether the next OCR inquiry finds defensible evidence, whether the next ransomware event becomes an operational disruption, and whether the next CMS Conditions of Participation review goes well. These are the forces shaping those decisions.
HHS HSCC and HHS OCR have documented sustained ransomware activity targeting healthcare, with operational disruptions to clinical care now commonplace and patient safety implications including delayed care and diversion of emergency services. The 405(d) Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices framework provides the federal-aligned posture.
Sentinel implication: An organization without a documented 405(d)-aligned posture is operating below the federal-recognized standard. The cyber posture and the patient safety posture are now the same posture.
Source: HHS Health Sector Coordinating Council (HSCC) HIC-MaHTSP; HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) breach portal data; HHS 405(d) Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices
FDA premarket cybersecurity guidance, the Refuse to Accept policy on medical device cybersecurity submissions, and CISA medical device advisories have made medical device security a procurement requirement, not a post-deployment review. Hospital cyber programs increasingly inherit medical device exposure they cannot directly remediate.
Sentinel implication: An organization whose cyber program does not include medical device security is operating with an attack surface it cannot account for at the next risk assessment. The biomedical and cyber programs have to converge.
Source: FDA Cybersecurity in Medical Devices guidance (premarket and postmarket); CISA Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) medical device advisories; HHS 405(d) medical device guidance
HHS OCR has progressively increased enforcement actions, breach scrutiny, and penalty assessments, with the breach portal making documented incidents publicly visible. Settlements in the seven-and-eight-figure range have become routine, and the audit substance is documentation evidence, not narrative explanation.
Sentinel implication: An organization whose breach response and ongoing risk posture cannot be evidenced in documentation is producing a future OCR finding. The documentation decision today is the OCR-defense decision.
Source: HHS OCR Breach Portal and resolution agreements; HHS OCR Right of Access enforcement; OCR audit protocol updates
CISA Cyber Performance Goals (CPGs), the proposed CMS integration of cyber readiness into Conditions of Participation, and the HHS Healthcare and Public Health Sector strategy have begun aligning cyber expectations with reimbursement frameworks. The federal posture is converging across CMS, HHS, and CISA.
Sentinel implication: An organization whose cyber program is not benchmarked against CISA CPGs and HHS strategy is operating below the federal-aligned framework. CMS, HHS, and CISA are no longer separate compliance frameworks.
Source: CISA Cybersecurity Performance Goals (CPGs); HHS Healthcare and Public Health Sector strategy; CMS Conditions of Participation cybersecurity proposed rulemaking
Third-party breaches, business associate exposures, and supply-chain compromises have become a dominant breach vector in healthcare, documented across HSCC, HHS OCR, and industry cyber reports. Business Associate Agreement compliance and supply-chain cyber posture are now audit substance.
Sentinel implication: An organization whose third-party cyber posture is not documented and continuously assessed is creating a future breach attribution it cannot defend. The third-party risk program is the cyber program.
Source: HSCC Third-Party Risk Management resources; HHS OCR breach data on business-associate-attributed incidents; CISA supply chain risk management guidance
CORE CAPABILITIES
Every engagement is anchored in six disciplines that protect hospitals from bad decisions, bad contracts, and bad outcomes.
Clinicians will use a system if it is built for them and rolled out the right way, and abandon it if it is not. We design change strategies informed by real-world deployments, including our founder’s Joint Commission to ICD-10 national coding transition experience, so adoption sticks.
We identify the technical, operational, contractual, cyber, HIPAA, and political risks that threaten your program, and build mitigation strategies your CEO, CMO, or board can defend in any audit, after-action, or community meeting.
RFP development, scoring rubric design, vendor evaluation, reference checks, contract negotiation, and SOW authoring. We level the playing field so the best fit wins, not the best sales team or the slickest demo.
PMP-disciplined program governance with public-sector fluency. We structure work for political visibility, audit defensibility, and multi-administration continuity, so your modernization survives elections, budget cycles, and command turnover.
Beyond advisory. Sentinel can operate alongside your team, maintaining EHR and clinical systems environments, mobile data infrastructure, clinical archives, networks, cybersecurity controls, and every system that touches patient safety and clinical integrity.
We watch the vendor so you do not have to. Independent verification and validation across milestones, data conversion, acceptance testing, training, go-live, and warranty, keeping vendors accountable to the contract you signed.
Most firms specialize in one slice, the EHR, the revenue cycle, the imaging, the analytics. We have sat at every seat and engineered every layer. This signature is how we see the full arc, and where Sentinel sits most actively.
Five ongoing services shaped by the pressures of modern healthcare. Records systems kept clean against CMS and Joint Commission reporting standards, critical incidents reviewed with defensibility in mind, and clinical analytics built to actually reduce time-to-resolution.
Ongoing EHR configuration, user management, reporting setup, and system optimization.
Continuous validation of reporting data to ensure CMS and Joint Commission reporting accuracy, with audit-ready documentation.
Independent analysis of high-risk incidents to identify trends and reduce liability exposure.
Streamlining body camera and clinical documentation processes to reduce backlog and improve audit and compliance readiness.
Full lifecycle support for RTCC development, including staffing models, workflows, and technology integration.
OUR PRACTICES
Every Sentinel engagement is governed by proprietary practices built for the realities of healthcare technology, not borrowed from commercial IT playbooks.
PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
How we govern your program.
PMP-disciplined program governance structured for multi-jurisdictional complexity, elected leadership accountability, and federal grant compliance. Every milestone and decision gate is designed for the healthcare reality, where executive transitions, board oversight, CMS mandates, and union negotiations shape the timeline more than any vendor’s project plan.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
How we prepare your people.
Organizational change management built for bedside clinicians, charge nurses, and clinical leadership, not corporate end users. We design adoption strategies informed by shift rotations, union dynamics, field deployment realities, and the operational truth that your EHR and clinical systems cannot go dark for training. When the new system goes live, your clinicians and staff are ready.
CONFIGURATION AUTHORITY
How we own the configuration.
Configuration authority for EDR/SIEM deployments, identity and access governance, HIPAA and HITRUST control frameworks, and medical device network segmentation. Sentinel owns the foundational decisions around detection logic, alert handling, vendor risk tiering, and breach-response runbooks, producing the Blueprint, training, and administrator documentation that holds up under audit and ransomware conditions.
VALUE ASSURANCE
How we prove the value.
Post-deployment governance for your healthcare security and compliance platform investment. Sentinel independently measures whether HIPAA posture, threat detection, and audit-readiness outcomes specified at procurement are being realized, and produces the evidentiary record auditors require.
After engagement closes, Sentinel Sustain keeps the practice active across the life of the investment. Three tiers: Core, Active, and Strategic.
Learn more →Four practices, applied to one operating environment: the SIEM, the identity layer, the medical device estate, the compliance evidence archive. Each practice carries a specific scope and a specific deliverable cadence.
On a SIEM migration, zero-trust rollout, or 405(d) alignment program, SDF runs the phase plan, the gate reviews, and the vendor accountability cadence. The CISO sees a defensible program record at every board update, and a documented audit trail at every OCR inquiry, CMS Conditions of Participation review, and CISA advisory cycle. SDF holds the program steady through threat-landscape shifts, executive transitions, and the inevitable mid-deployment surprise.
When an organization deploys a new SIEM, rolls out zero trust, or operationalizes 405(d) practices, SRM prepares the security and clinical workforce for what changes and what stays the same. SOC analyst enablement, IT operations workflow revisions, clinical-IT coordination, and the post-go-live support cadence are scoped against operational reality and patient-safety implications.
During SIEM deployment, identity rollout, or medical-device security architecture, SDB is the practitioner-delivered configuration authority that sits on the organization's side of the table. Detection rules, identity policies, medical device segmentation, evidence-archive configuration, 405(d)-aligned controls, and the technical decisions vendors typically push back on are documented with the organization's answer in the room. SDB is delivered by Sentinel practitioners. It is not offered as training.
Twelve, twenty-four, and thirty-six months after deployment, alongside breach-readiness validation cycles, SVA reviews whether the system is performing to the documented intent: detection efficacy, control coverage, evidence-archive integrity, and configuration drift the organization did not see at procurement time. The findings are advisory and non-binding by design. Sentinel documents. We do not litigate. No legal representation. No expert witness role. SVA is delivered by Sentinel practitioners. It is not offered as training.
DEEP EXPERTISE
These are the specific platforms, standards, protocols, and operational disciplines we work in every day.
WE KNOW THE TRICKS OF THE TRADE
These are the traps that consume budgets, derail timelines, and leave hospitals stuck with systems that do not serve them. We have seen them firsthand, and we know exactly how to neutralize them.
01
EHR and clinical platform vendors that encode patient data, workflow metadata, and report templates in formats only they can read. We insist on open data standards, documented schemas, and exportability clauses before the contract is signed.
02
The line items that appear after go-live: lab interfaces, imaging integrations, pharmacy connectors, HIE feeds, and “professional services” fees for every custom API call. We surface them during procurement, not after.
03
Per-user licensing that escalates with system growth, storage tiers that punish retention compliance, and per-export fees for clinical documents or data migration. We negotiate caps, predictable storage costs, and portability terms up front.
04
Cloud and managed-service vendors that sign HIPAA attestations they cannot actually fulfill, leaving your organization holding the bag at audit time. We verify HIPAA posture before the contract, not after the breach.
05
Vendors who promise “intuitive” platforms and deliver weeks of clinician training your team was never warned about. We demand realistic training hours, super-user programs, and protected ramp-up periods in the SOW.
06
Organizations that sign based on demos and reference calls curated by the vendor. We conduct independent reference checks and dig into how the platform actually performs at organizations of comparable size and complexity.
WHO YOU ARE WORKING WITH
The people who lead every Sentinel engagement have spent their careers inside hospitals, behind the engineering consoles of the country’s most complex clinical systems, and at the bedside and nursing stations that keep patients safe.
HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS & NURSING LEADERSHIP
HEALTHCARE, CLINICAL OPERATIONS & PATIENT SAFETY ADVISORY
Also Supporting Your Program
The right engagement depends on where the organization is in the program lifecycle. Each tier has its own scope discipline and its own deliverable cadence.
End-to-end managed operations for the SIEM, identity, endpoint, medical-device security, and compliance-reporting infrastructure Sentinel helped you deploy. Sustainment, vendor coordination, HIPAA-and-HITECH-aware version-upgrade discipline, and 24/7 SOC response. The control is still defensible at the next audit, because someone is still accountable for the evidence trail.
We govern the program. We never sell the platforms.
Read moreOngoing retainer with quarterly governance reviews, pre-decision advisory, and an open line for board reporting, OCR response, breach notification readiness, and vendor escalations. The organization has independent counsel on the technology side of the table, before the next OCR inquiry, the next ransomware tabletop, or the next risk-assessment cycle.
Sentinel documents. We do not litigate.
Read moreAnchored to one of SDF, SRM, SDB, or SVA. Best when the organization knows which discipline is needed: a SIEM migration, zero-trust rollout change readiness, configuration authority on identity and access, or post-deployment outcome governance with breach-readiness validation. Fixed scope, named practice, defined deliverables.
Independent. Practitioner-led. Vendor-neutral.
Explore subscriptionsA specialized service plus a signature practice plus Sentinel Institute training, packaged as a single integrated engagement. For organizations standing up a new cybersecurity program from scratch and building the institutional capacity to govern it across clinical, administrative, and medical-device environments.
Cutting-edge. Never bleeding-edge.
Read moreTemplates, Tools, and Office Hours
Low-touch entry tier. Sentinel templates, tools, reference materials, and scheduled office hours. The agency runs its own program; Sentinel provides the assets and answers the questions when they come up. No retainer, no embedded staff, no committed scope.
Best when: The agency wants Sentinel's templates and judgment but is not ready to engage a subscription. A starting point that can scale up if the program grows.
Built for the agency. Sized for the start.
Read more about Standard Access →Most organizations run multiple technology programs at once. Sentinel work in healthcare cyber work typically pairs with one or more of these companion disciplines, where the same governance discipline applies.
OCR, CMS, and 405(d) posture cut across every clinical platform decision.
AI governance and cyber governance are the same governance discipline.
Surveillance system security is part of the federal-aligned cyber posture.
A thirty-minute conversation about your program, your timing, and what is actually going to get used. Then we will recommend an engagement, a subscription, or no action at all. Whatever the organization actually needs.
Schedule a conversation