Crosswalk pair
HIPAA and NIST SP 800-53, control by control
23 canonical controls in Keel’s library satisfy clauses of both HIPAA and NIST SP 800-53. Implement each once, attach the evidence once, and it counts toward each standard. The overlap is the work you don’t repeat.
The overlap
What the two libraries have in common
Every figure here counts canonical controls in Keel’s library, not clauses of either standard. Each standard’s own authored count is on its framework page.
23
Controls that satisfy both
Canonical controls that crosswalk to at least one clause of each.
31
In Keel’s library for HIPAA
74% of them also map to NIST SP 800-53.
28
In Keel’s library for NIST SP 800-53
82% of them also map to HIPAA.
100
Evidence artifacts expected
Across the shared controls, from Keel’s evidence guidance. Gathered once.
-
HIPAA 74%
23 controls of 31 in Keel’s library for HIPAA also map to NIST SP 800-53.
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NIST SP 800-53 82%
23 controls of 28 in Keel’s library for NIST SP 800-53 also map to HIPAA.
The mapping
Controls that satisfy both
Each row is one control in Keel’s library and the clauses it answers on each side. Do the work once; both columns are then evidenced by the same artifacts.
| Canonical control | HIPAA clauses | NIST SP 800-53 clauses |
|---|---|---|
| Governance & Risk | ||
| Information security policy A board-approved policy set covering information security and the handling of personal data, sized to the scale of the organization and the type of activities it actually carries out, reviewed at least annually and communicated to the workforce. The policy set states the direction the organization is taking on information security - what it commits to, and what it requires of everyone doing work for it - so it sets where the programme is going rather than only recording what it already does. One or more named individuals are designated to coordinate the programme the policies describe - the person in charge of it, named rather than implied, with the designation recorded in writing, made known to the people who need it and kept current as roles change - so there is someone who answers for the policies being carried out and not only for their being published. How far the policies go, and how far the measures they require go, is judged against four things together: the organization’s size, complexity and capabilities; its technical infrastructure and the security capabilities of its hardware and software; what the measures cost; and how likely the risks they address are and how much damage they would do. A policy may be changed at any time, provided the change is documented and is actually put into effect rather than only written down. | 164.316(a), 164.530(i)(1) | PL-1 |
| Internal audit program A risk-based internal audit program evaluates conformity and effectiveness at planned intervals, and again when an environmental or operational change could have undermined what was last evaluated; each evaluation covers both technical testing and non-technical review of whether the documented policies and procedures are actually being met. The programme itself is written down - how often audits run, what methods they use, who is responsible for them, what each one covers and how it reports - and nobody audits their own work, so a finding is an independent judgement rather than a self-assessment. The results of each audit go to the management responsible for the area audited, and the programme and its results are retained as evidence that it ran. | 164.308(a)(8) | CA-2 |
| Risk assessment & treatment A documented process to identify, analyze, evaluate, and treat information security risks on a defined cadence, and again whenever a significant change is proposed or has happened - a new system, a new supplier, a reorganization, a serious incident - so the picture is refreshed by events and not only by the calendar. The process is repeatable: the criteria for accepting risk and for deciding when an assessment is performed are set in advance and applied the same way each time, so repeated assessments produce consistent, comparable and valid results rather than a different answer depending on who ran it. Every risk has a named owner who approves how it will be treated and accepts what is left afterwards. The assessment covers risks and vulnerabilities to the confidentiality, the integrity and the availability of the data the organization holds - all three, not confidentiality alone - and is accurate and thorough enough to be relied on by the decisions taken from it. Treatment brings each risk down to a level that is reasonable and appropriate for this organization, which is the target the process is judged against rather than merely recording that a risk exists. Each assessment and its results are retained as documented information. | 164.308(a)(1)(ii)(A), 164.308(a)(1)(ii)(B) | RA-3, RA-7 |
| Access Control | ||
| Access control policy Rules for granting, reviewing, and revoking access to systems and data based on business need and least privilege; anyone who works with sensitive data, or in a place from which it can be reached, is individually authorized for that work or supervised while doing it; and a documented emergency route exists to obtain the data when the normal access path is unavailable, with every use of that route recorded and reviewed afterwards. | 164.308(a)(3)(ii)(A), 164.308(a)(4)(ii)(B), 164.312(a)(2)(ii) | AC-1, AC-2, AC-3, AC-6 |
| Multi-factor authentication Documented procedures verify that a person or system seeking access to sensitive data is the one it claims to be, on every path by which that data can be reached - and multi-factor authentication is the enforced mechanism for remote access, administrative access, and access to sensitive systems and data. The multi-factor mechanism itself is configured so it cannot be bypassed, so the factors it uses are genuinely independent of one another - one factor’s success granting no knowledge of and no route around another - and so access is refused unless every factor required has succeeded. | 164.312(d) | IA-2 |
| Password & credential management Rules for the authentication credentials themselves: passwords are unique per account and meet a defined strength standard, a new or changed password is screened against a list of commonly used, expected and compromised passwords and refused if it appears there, a credential issued for first use must be replaced immediately, reuse of previous passwords is refused, changes follow a defined procedure, repeated failed authentication attempts lock the account for a defined period, and passwords, keys and other authentication secrets are stored and transmitted only in protected form. | 164.308(a)(5)(ii)(D) | IA-5, IA-5(1) |
| User provisioning & deprovisioning Joiner/mover/leaver process to grant, change, and promptly remove access across systems, in which every person is issued an account of their own carrying a unique name or number, so an action in a log traces back to one named individual rather than to a shared or generic login. Each person’s right of access is recorded when it is established and reviewed on a schedule thereafter, as well as granted and changed - so what someone holds is a documented position that has been looked at again, not the accumulated residue of past requests - and what may be granted follows the organization’s access authorization rules rather than the judgement of whoever processes the request. | 164.308(a)(4)(ii)(B), 164.308(a)(4)(ii)(C), 164.312(a)(2)(i) | AC-2, PS-4, PS-5 |
| Data Protection & Privacy | ||
| Data classification & handling Information is classified and handled per its sensitivity, with rules for labeling and protection - including the everyday handling rules that stop it being seen, overheard or picked up by people with no business reading it, so exposure that happens incidentally alongside legitimate work is limited rather than accepted. The handling rules are written to cover disclosure that nobody intended as much as disclosure that somebody chose, they say what an unauthorized disclosure is against the organization’s own privacy and confidentiality rules rather than leaving that to judgement in the moment, and they reach every medium the information travels in - spoken, on paper, on a screen and in a system - because the incidental exposure they exist to limit does not respect the boundary between an administrative, a physical and a technical safeguard. | 164.530(c)(2) | RA-2 |
| Data integrity verification Mechanisms that would actually detect sensitive data being altered or destroyed without authorization, rather than assuming it has not been: checksums, hashes or digital signatures computed over stored records and re-verified rather than written once; integrity monitoring over the files and systems holding them; integrity verification of the software and firmware those systems run - signed packages and images, and detection of unauthorized change to executables, configuration and device firmware, because data that verifies clean under code that does not is not verified at all; and integrity protection on data in transit, so a change made between sender and receiver is detected before the data is relied on. A failed check raises an alert to someone who investigates it, and what was found is recorded. | 164.312(c)(2), 164.312(e)(2)(i) | SI-7 |
| Data retention & secure disposal Data is retained per policy and securely destroyed when no longer needed. The hardware and media that held it reach a defined final disposition at end of life, by a route the organization has decided in advance rather than by whatever happens to the box; and any media that stays in service is cleared of that data before it is reused, reassigned, or passed to anyone else. | 164.310(d)(2)(i), 164.310(d)(2)(ii) | MP-6, SI-12 |
| Encryption in transit & at rest Strong cryptography protects sensitive data in transit over public networks and at rest in storage. | 164.312(a)(2)(iv), 164.312(e)(2)(ii) | SC-13, SC-28, SC-8 |
| Infrastructure & Operations | ||
| Asset inventory An inventory of hardware, software, and information assets with assigned owners, in which the movement of equipment and removable media into, out of, and within the organization’s premises is recorded against the person responsible for it. | 164.310(d)(2)(iii) | CM-8 |
| Logging & monitoring Security-relevant events - including successful and failed log-in attempts - are logged, protected, retained, and reviewed for anomalies, and the discrepancies that review finds are reported to the people who act on them. The review runs on a defined cadence and covers the records of system activity as a set - the audit logs, the reports of who accessed what, and the record of security incidents - rather than the log stream alone. | 164.308(a)(1)(ii)(D), 164.308(a)(5)(ii)(C), 164.312(b) | AU-2, AU-6, AU-12 |
| Malware protection Anti-malware controls prevent, detect, and respond to malicious software on endpoints and servers, and detections are reported to the people who act on them. The mechanism is kept live rather than merely installed: signatures, definitions and detection engines update automatically as the vendor issues them rather than on someone remembering to apply them, what it detects and what it does about it is logged, and it runs where an ordinary user cannot switch it off, uninstall it or exclude their way around it - only a documented, authorized change may disable it, and then for a stated period. | 164.308(a)(5)(ii)(B) | SI-3 |
| Workstation & endpoint security The devices people use to reach sensitive data are governed on three axes. What may be done on them and how - the permitted functions, software and networks, and the way each is to be carried out. Where they may be used - the physical surroundings a screen can be overlooked from, and what has to be true of a place before work happens there. And how the device itself is protected so only authorized users reach it - screens and desks cleared when unattended, devices locked down or taken with the person when they leave. Two separate mechanisms run here and a screen lock does not stand in for the other. A device left idle LOCKS after a defined period, concealing what is on screen, and stays locked until the user re-establishes access through identification and authentication. Separately, a user session on an application or system holding sensitive data is automatically TERMINATED - torn down, not merely obscured - so it cannot be resumed by whoever is at the keyboard. The conditions and trigger events that require termination are defined by the organization and written down rather than left to be inferred: a predetermined period of user inactivity is one of them and is the one required wherever health data is in scope, but the set also reaches a targeted response to particular kinds of incident and restrictions on the time of day a system may be used. | 164.310(b), 164.310(c), 164.312(a)(2)(iii) | AC-11, AC-12 |
| Resilience & Continuity | ||
| Backups Regular, tested backups of critical data and systems with defined retention, each one a RETRIEVABLE EXACT COPY of the data it protects - complete and restorable, not a partial or lossy snapshot - including a copy taken before equipment holding that data is moved. | 164.308(a)(7)(ii)(A), 164.310(d)(2)(iv) | CP-9 |
| Business continuity & disaster recovery BC/DR plans with defined RTO/RPO, tested periodically AND REVISED on what the testing finds and on what has changed since, to restore service after disruption - including how the critical processes that protect sensitive data keep running while the organization is operating in emergency mode, and an assessment of how critical each application and data set is, which is what sets those recovery targets and the order in which things come back. | 164.308(a)(7)(ii)(B), 164.308(a)(7)(ii)(C), 164.308(a)(7)(ii)(D), 164.308(a)(7)(ii)(E) | CP-2, CP-10 |
| Incident response A documented, tested plan to detect, triage, contain, remediate, and communicate security incidents, and to mitigate - so far as is practicable - the harmful effect of a use or disclosure of personal data the organization knows breached its own policies or the law. Each incident is recorded together with its outcome - what happened, what was done about it and how it ended - as a record of that incident, which is a different artifact from the plan being documented. The mitigation duty runs to violations by the organization itself AND to violations by the processors, vendors and other parties handling that data on its behalf: the plan reaches an incident somebody else caused with the organization’s data, so learning of one triggers the same containment and remediation as an incident inside its own walls rather than a request that the other party deal with it. Where an incident carries a duty to tell someone outside the organization, the plan discharges it on the clock the applicable law sets rather than whenever the investigation happens to conclude: whether an incident is notifiable is decided against written criteria rather than argued after the fact, the regulator or supervisory authority is notified inside the deadline that regime states, the people whose data is affected are told where the risk to them warrants it, and where a deadline is missed the notification itself explains the delay instead of passing over it. | 164.308(a)(6)(ii), 164.530(f) | IR-4, IR-5, IR-6, IR-8 |
| Third-party Risk | ||
| Third-party / vendor risk management Due diligence, contractual safeguards, and ongoing monitoring of vendors that handle your data: the agreement obliges the vendor to comply in its own right with the security requirements that apply to it - an absolute standard, not a promise to match whatever you happen to do - to pass those obligations down to any subcontractor it brings in BY ENTERING INTO a contract or equivalent written arrangement with that subcontractor rather than by merely requiring equivalent practice of it, and to report to you, within a stated time, security incidents it becomes aware of and confirmed breaches of your data. Where a contract is not the instrument available, an equivalent written arrangement carrying the same obligations discharges the duty. The same obligations, together with the separation that keeps a related organization out of data it is not entitled to, are written into the governing document of any other arrangement that puts your data in the hands of a sponsor, parent, affiliate or plan. Diligence is not confined to security where the relationship warrants more: for suppliers significant enough to matter, the organization states the standards of conduct it expects of them - how they behave commercially and how they treat the environment around their operations - and screens candidates and incumbents against those stated expectations as part of the same selection and monitoring cycle, rather than accepting a signature on a code as evidence of it. | 164.308(b)(3), 164.314(a)(2), 164.314(b)(2) | SA-9, SR-3, SR-6 |
| People & Culture | ||
| Disciplinary & sanctions process A defined process for acting on a member of the workforce who breaches the organization’s security or personal-data policies: how a suspected breach is established, who decides, what range of sanctions is available and how the response is kept proportionate to what was done, and who is told when a sanction is initiated. Each sanction applied is recorded. The workforce is told the process exists and will be used, because a sanction nobody knew was possible deters nobody. | 164.308(a)(1)(ii)(C), 164.530(e)(2) | PS-8 |
| Personnel security (HR) Background screening, confidentiality agreements, and onboarding/offboarding security steps. Before a person is given access to sensitive data, and again whenever their role changes, a documented determination is made that the access their work calls for is appropriate to it - the screening informs that decision but is not the decision. What screening may ask is itself bounded: enquiries about a candidate’s health, disability or medical history are not made, and medical examinations are not required, before a conditional offer of the role has been made, and where such enquiries or examinations are made after an offer they are applied to everyone entering that role rather than to the individuals somebody chose to ask. Access is ended when their employment, or any other arrangement under which they worked for the organization, comes to an end, and whenever that determination says they should no longer hold it. | 164.308(a)(3)(ii)(B), 164.308(a)(3)(ii)(C) | PS-2, PS-3, PS-6, PS-7 |
| Security awareness training Ongoing security and data-handling awareness training for all personnel, with completion tracking, and periodic security updates - reminders, bulletins and alerts - issued to the workforce between training cycles. New joiners are trained within a defined period of starting, anyone whose work is affected is retrained within a defined period after a material change to the policies or procedures, and every completion is recorded. | 164.308(a)(5)(ii)(A), 164.530(b)(2) | AT-2, AT-3, AT-4 |
| Physical & Environmental | ||
| Physical security Physical access to facilities and equipment holding sensitive data is restricted and monitored, and a person’s access is validated against the role or function that justifies it rather than only logged; visitors are controlled as a case of their own, and so is access to software programs held for testing and revision. The facility and the equipment in it are safeguarded against tampering and theft as well as against unauthorized entry. The people who have to reach the site and the equipment when a continuity or recovery plan is invoked can still get in, by a route that is planned rather than improvised; and repairs and modifications to the physical security components of a facility - doors, locks, walls, and the hardware that controls entry - are recorded. | 164.310(a)(2)(i), 164.310(a)(2)(ii), 164.310(a)(2)(iii), 164.310(a)(2)(iv) | PE-2, PE-3, PE-6 |
Beyond the pair
Where else this work counts
A framework is lit when a shared control above also maps to it. Unlit means none of them do — an absence, not a judgment about that standard.
Also reached by these 23 controls
- AI Governance Essentials
- Amazon Appstore Child-Directed Apps
- Apple App Store Kids Category
- CIS Critical Security Controls
- COPPA
- ESG Essentials
- EU AI Act
- GDPR
- Google Play Families
- ISO 9001
- ISO/IEC 27001
- ISO/IEC 42001
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework
- NIST SP 800-171
- PCI DSS
- SOC 2
- SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) Section 404
- US Employment Law - Federal Baseline
Nearby pairs
The thesis
Why this is one project, not two
On a crosswalk-native model, NIST SP 800-53 mostly lights up controls you already built for HIPAA. You’re not re-uploading the same screenshot for a second audit. You apply the framework and see the genuine delta worth working. That’s the whole idea behind collect once, comply everywhere.
Next step
Add NIST SP 800-53 to the work you already did
Apply both frameworks in one workspace and see the overlap measured against the controls you already hold.