CORL Technologies is focused on creating a sea change in the healthcare industry by improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs.
By distilling hundreds of questions into a concise set of truly critical controls, it promises to reduce assessment fatigue for both providers and vendors, cut costs, and improve patient safety in an increasingly interconnected digital health ecosystem.
CORL Technologies is positioning its CORL Cleared program as a new benchmark for third-party risk management (TPRM) in healthcare. In a landscape dominated by sprawling questionnaires, fragmented tools, and confusing security scores, CORL Cleared focuses on what actually matters: a small, rigorously validated set of requirements that reliably signal a vendor’s real security posture. For healthcare organizations struggling to keep up with cyber threats and regulatory expectations, this represents a meaningful shift toward faster, more trustworthy vendor due diligence.
The launch of CORL Cleared in 2023 coincides with unprecedented pressure on hospitals, payers, and digital health companies to manage cybersecurity risk across vast vendor ecosystems. With ransomware, supply-chain attacks, and data breaches regularly making headlines, boards and regulators are demanding stronger controls without adding unsustainable overhead to clinical and business operations.
This article unpacks the mission, methodology, and implications of CORL Cleared, with a focus on how it might change vendor onboarding, contracting timelines, and long-term risk posture in the U.S. healthcare sector.
Mission Overview
CORL Technologies’ core mission with CORL Cleared is to create a “sea change” in healthcare cybersecurity risk management by simplifying and standardizing how third-party security assurance is performed. Instead of treating each vendor as a bespoke assessment project, CORL Cleared seeks to define a common security bar that is:
- Evidence-based and aligned with respected assurance frameworks
- Efficient for vendors to complete once and then reuse across multiple customers
- Trustworthy enough for healthcare organizations to rely on for contracting decisions
- Flexible enough to adapt to evolving regulatory and threat landscapes
“Security is not just about compliance checklists—it’s about continuous, risk-based decision making that protects patients’ data and care delivery.”
While CORL Cleared is focused on the U.S. market, its underlying philosophy mirrors global trends in cybersecurity: measurable assurance, shared standards, and reduced friction in digital supply chains.
The Problem with Status Quo Third-Party Risk Management
Traditional third-party risk management in healthcare has grown unwieldy. Providers and payers often face:
- Disparate questionnaires – Every health system may issue a different, multi-hundred-question security questionnaire, even for similar risk profiles.
- Overcrowded tool landscapes – Organizations juggle multiple GRC platforms, vendor risk portals, and spreadsheet trackers, often with no single source of truth.
- Confusing exchanges and scorecards – Third-party “ratings” and document exchanges can obscure, rather than clarify, the real risk level.
- Assessment fatigue – Vendors answer nearly identical questions repeatedly, draining security and compliance teams without materially improving protection.
This process is expensive, slow, and, at times, misleading. A vendor might ace a questionnaire but still have weak patch management, inadequate segmentation, or untested incident response—all areas strongly correlated with breach impact.
The result is a paradox: heavy TPRM workloads but uneven real-world risk reduction. CORL Cleared’s value proposition is to untangle this paradox by focusing TPRM energy on controls that genuinely predict security outcomes.
Technology and Methodology Behind CORL Cleared
CORL Cleared builds on the “collective efforts of widely respected assurance frameworks” such as:
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)
- HITRUST CSF
- ISO/IEC 27001 and related standards
- HIPAA Security Rule implementation specifications
Instead of re-creating a new framework from scratch, CORL distills overlapping requirements into a compact set of key controls. While the exact proprietary control set is not fully public, it typically emphasizes areas such as:
- Identity and access management (least privilege, MFA, role-based access)
- Network and infrastructure security (segmentation, secure configurations)
- Vulnerability management (scanning cadence, patch SLAs, remediation workflows)
- Incident detection and response (runbooks, logging, tested playbooks)
- Data protection (encryption at rest and in transit, backup and recovery)
- Governance and training (security awareness, vendor oversight, policies)
From Hundreds of Questions to a Focused Control Set
CORL’s approach is to collapse hundreds of conventional questionnaire items into a smaller, more discriminating set of:
- Control requirements – What must be in place (e.g., MFA for privileged accounts).
- Evidence expectations – What artifacts demonstrate that the control is real and operating.
- Scoring logic – How to translate evidence into a clear “pass/conditional/insufficient” outcome.
This yields an assurance profile that is easier to interpret and more predictive of actual cyber resilience than long-form questionnaires filled with ambiguous responses.
Leveraging Data and Automation
While CORL Cleared is not a pure automation product, it increasingly leverages:
- Standardized data models for vendor profiles and control attestations
- Integration options with GRC tools and vendor management platforms
- Automated reminders and workflow tracking to keep evidence up-to-date
- Analytics to highlight systemic gaps across a health system’s vendor portfolio
“Supply chain cybersecurity requires repeatable, data-driven processes—one-off questionnaires will not scale to modern ecosystems.”
Scientific and Operational Significance for Healthcare
Although TPRM is often treated as an administrative burden, its impact is deeply scientific and clinical in nature. Cyber incidents can disrupt:
- Clinical workflows – Downtime of EHRs, imaging systems, or connected devices
- Research programs – Loss or corruption of trial data and bioinformatics pipelines
- Population health analytics – Compromised data quality in AI-driven models
By prioritizing vendors that meet a robust security baseline, healthcare organizations can better protect the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of systems that underpin patient care and biomedical research.
From an evidence-based practice standpoint, CORL Cleared also enables more consistent comparison between vendors. Instead of loosely comparing ad hoc questionnaires, organizations can:
- Benchmark all vendors against a uniform control set.
- Identify systemic weaknesses (e.g., many vendors failing in the same control domain).
- Target remediation investments toward the most impactful shared gaps.
“Cybersecurity in healthcare is patient safety. Every vulnerability in a vendor’s system is a potential point of failure in care delivery.”
Key Milestones in CORL Cleared’s Evolution
Since its public launch in April 2023, CORL Cleared has been part of a broader maturation of healthcare vendor risk practices. While CORL’s internal roadmap is proprietary, several milestones are observable within the industry context:
- Program Launch (2023) – Public introduction of CORL Cleared as a “gold standard” certification for vendors serving U.S. healthcare organizations.
- Early Vendor Adoption – Cloud-native digital health vendors and niche service providers seeking faster sales cycles began pursuing third-party validations like CORL Cleared alongside SOC 2 and HITRUST certifications.
- Integration with Procurement and Legal Workflows – Health systems started aligning procurement policies to accept standardized third-party validations in lieu of redundant questionnaires for appropriate risk tiers.
- Alignment with HHS Cybersecurity Performance Goals (2023–2024) – As the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released voluntary and then increasingly formalized cybersecurity performance goals for healthcare, vendors and healthcare entities sought ways to map assurance programs like CORL Cleared to these goals.
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, expanded automation, continuous monitoring hooks, and closer alignment with federal incentives and regulations are likely directions of travel for programs of this type.
Challenges and Limitations
Despite its promise, CORL Cleared operates in a complex ecosystem with inherent challenges:
1. One Size Rarely Fits All
Healthcare vendors vary dramatically—from small digital therapeutics startups to multinational cloud providers. A single control bar must be adaptable across:
- Differing regulatory obligations (HIPAA Business Associate vs. non-BAA vendors)
- Technical architectures (on-premises, hybrid, SaaS, serverless)
- Risk tiers (critical clinical systems versus low-risk utilities)
2. Keeping Pace with Threat Evolution
Ransomware groups, supply-chain attackers, and APTs evolve tactics quickly. A static control set can become outdated if not continuously updated with:
- Threat intelligence
- Insights from real incidents
- Regulatory changes and enforcement trends
3. Avoiding “Checkbox Certification”
Any certification risks devolving into a checkbox exercise if:
- Evidence is not rigorously validated.
- Controls are not tied to real operational behavior.
- There is no expectation of periodic review or recertification.
“Certificates don’t stop attackers—well-implemented controls and monitoring do.”
4. Coordination Across Stakeholders
For CORL Cleared to reach its full impact, multiple stakeholders must align:
- Vendor security and compliance teams
- Hospital CISOs and privacy officers
- Procurement, legal, and contracting groups
- Clinical and business sponsors of new technologies
Alignment requires change management, clear policies, and internal education about what CORL Cleared signifies—and what it does not.
Practical Impacts on Contracting and Operations
CORL Cleared’s most immediate operational benefit is faster, more predictable contracting. When a vendor has already undergone CORL Cleared assessment:
- Healthcare organizations can reuse the existing assessment instead of issuing a new questionnaire.
- Security and legal review cycles shrink, often from months to weeks.
- Internal stakeholders gain clearer, standardized risk summaries.
For vendors, particularly startups and growth-stage digital health companies, this can significantly accelerate time-to-revenue and reduce the repetitive workload on small security teams.
How a Typical Workflow Might Look
- Vendor completes CORL Cleared assessment once, providing evidence and remediation where needed.
- Vendor receives a result indicating whether it meets the standardized bar for specific risk categories.
- When selling into new healthcare customers, the vendor shares its CORL Cleared status and evidence package.
- The healthcare organization reviews the package, maps it to internal policies, and focuses any additional questions only on unique or high-risk aspects of the engagement.
This workflow contrasts sharply with the status quo, where each sale can trigger a brand-new, bespoke assessment process.
Complementary Tools and Learning Resources
While CORL Cleared focuses on standardized assurance, many healthcare organizations and vendors also rely on additional tools and references to strengthen their programs.
- Hands-on cybersecurity practice: Resources like Cybersecurity Blue Team Toolkit can help internal teams sharpen operational defenses that align with vendor expectations.
- Healthcare-specific security guidance: The U.S. HHS HIPAA Security Rule guidance and the HHS 405(d) initiative provide actionable best practices for covered entities and business associates.
- Third-party risk education: The Shared Assessments program and materials from organizations like ISACA offer frameworks and training related to TPRM and IT governance.
- Video learning: Talks from security leaders at conferences such as RSA and Black Hat (for example, via RSA Conference’s YouTube channel ) often discuss real-world supply-chain and healthcare incidents.
Visualizing Third-Party Risk in Healthcare
The concepts behind CORL Cleared become clearer when visualized as a network of relationships and controls across the healthcare ecosystem.
Conclusion
CORL Cleared arrives at a pivotal moment for healthcare cybersecurity. As care delivery becomes more digital and interconnected, the weakest vendor in a health system’s ecosystem can become the point of entry for a serious incident. By offering a streamlined, evidence-based approach to third-party assurance, CORL Cleared aims to replace assessment chaos with clarity and speed.
Its success will depend on broad adoption, continuous updating of its control set, and clear communication about what certification means. Healthcare organizations should treat CORL Cleared (or any similar program) not as a replacement for all due diligence, but as a strong foundation they can augment for their highest-risk use cases.
If implemented thoughtfully, CORL Cleared can help redirect scarce security and compliance resources away from repetitive paperwork and toward what truly matters: defending clinical operations, protecting patient data, and supporting innovation in digital health.
Additional Considerations and Best Practices
Organizations evaluating CORL Cleared or similar programs can maximize value by combining standardized assurance with internal governance improvements:
- Classify vendors by risk tier so that only those with access to sensitive data or critical systems are required to meet the highest bar.
- Align internal policies so procurement, legal, IT, and clinical sponsors all understand when a standardized certification is sufficient versus when deeper assessment is necessary.
- Establish continuous oversight (e.g., annual reviews, incident reporting obligations, change notifications) even for “cleared” vendors.
- Integrate lessons learned from any incidents involving vendors back into your vendor risk criteria and contracting language.
For vendors, preparing for CORL Cleared or similar assessments can double as a roadmap for security program maturation. Conducting an internal gap analysis against NIST CSF or ISO 27001, investing in security training, and documenting processes thoroughly will not only improve certification outcomes but also reduce real-world breach risk.
References / Sources
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services – HIPAA Security Rule: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/index.html
- HHS 405(d) Cybersecurity Guidance for Healthcare: https://405d.hhs.gov
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework: https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework
- HITRUST CSF Overview: https://hitrustalliance.net/hitrust-csf
- ISACA IT Governance & Risk Resources: https://www.isaca.org/resources
- CISA – Supply Chain Risk Management: https://www.cisa.gov/topics/supply-chain-security
- National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence – Securing Telehealth and Telemedicine: https://www.nccoe.nist.gov/projects/securing-telehealth-and-telemedicine
Key Highlights :
Company Launches New Third-Party Risk Management Program, CORL Cleared, That Sets the Gold Standard for Vendors to Proactively Prove Their Security Posture and Removes the Need for Multiple Assessments
In today's digital age, healthcare organizations and vendors are increasingly reliant on third-party vendors to help manage their businesses. However, this dependence on third-party vendors also comes with significant risks, particularly in the area of cybersecurity. To mitigate these risks, healthcare organizations and vendors need a reliable third-party risk management program that can help them identify and manage the security risks associated with their vendors.
This is where CORL Cleared comes in. CORL Cleared is the latest third-party risk management program launched by a company that sets the gold standard for vendor security. CORL Cleared is the first program of its kind that provides the level of assurance healthcare organizations and vendors need to ensure that their vendors' security practices are up to par.
CORL Cleared sets the standard for vendor security by requiring vendors to proactively prove their security posture. This means that vendors have taken the time to review their security practices and have implemented the best practices available. CORL Cleared certification shows that a vendor has been thoroughly vetted and has the necessary controls in place to protect against potential cybersecurity threats.
CORL Cleared is a huge step forward for healthcare organizations and vendors, as it removes the need for multiple assessments, which can be time-consuming and expensive. With CORL Cleared, healthcare organizations and vendors can be confident that they are working with vendors that have already been certified and have demonstrated their ability to proactively manage their security risks.
CORL Cleared is available to healthcare organizations and vendors in the United States. For more information, interested parties can visit www.carlcleared.com.
The launch of CORL Cleared marks a significant milestone in third-party risk management. By providing a gold standard for vendor security, CORL Cleared sets a new benchmark for vendors to proactively manage their security posture. This program represents a significant step forward in reducing the risks associated with third-party vendors and provides a reliable framework for managing these risks.
In conclusion, the launch of CORL Cleared is a welcome development for healthcare organizations and vendors. It provides a reliable and effective third-party risk management program that sets the gold standard for vendor security. By removing the need for multiple assessments and providing a standardized framework for managing risks, CORL Cleared is set to become the go-to program for healthcare organizations and vendors seeking assurance that their vendors are proactively managing their security risks.
Contact: Media Relations CORL Cleared
404-872-9000
