Medical information is highly sensitive. A breach of even a small healthcare facility can cause damage to patients and providers. 

Cybersecurity has always been a concern in healthcare. As digital health starts to gain traction, security risks continue to grow. 

The health IT security website reported that in 2018, 15 million patient records were compromised in 503 breaches. About halfway of 2019, the numbers have skyrocketed with 25 million patient records breached. The number of breaches is deeply concerning in terms of privacy and security. 

In the digital health business, one of the key requirements you have to comply with is HIPAA compliance. The HIPPA sets the baseline for patient data protection. As a digital health business, you need strong security controls to gain customer trust. This is easily said than done. 

Thankfully, there are privacy and security compliance solutions for healthcare apps like MedStack which equip your business with real-time auditable security policies and fully-compliant monitoring. 

In my podcast interview with MedStack CEO and co-founder Balaji Gopalan, he shared how this solution is contributing to the health space, how it empowers businesses and more.

Benefits of Using Cloud Computing in Health Care

Balaji mentioned three advantages of utilizing a cloud solution. 

First, being able to engage with the patient no matter where they are. Second, being able to access a large data set and make discoveries easier. And the third is the idea of helping people in health care work together by making data more fluid. 

Healthcare is changing. Along with regulatory enhancements, clinical quality initiatives, and competition, organizations are also continually doing changes to support models of care. A cloud-based solution like MedStake offers companies the flexibility to address varying demands. 

Improving Security and Privacy

“Essentially what we do is instead of making these individual companies learn how to do this, we codify it and black box it in a sense. I want to be careful using that word because, at the same time, I’m going to say transparent because it’s very transparent. What we do so that it’s transparent that it’s working, but they don’t have to build it. They use a platform and all of the security and privacy are built-in automatically and all of the proof is built in automatically. And then we get involved in the audits that they pursue with their customers’ certification bodies to prove to them that they are doing.” Balaji shared.

The solution with its cloud hosting, compliance automation, and built-in protocols offer you the solid security your business needs, yet it also provides transparency in a way that you audit the system anytime. 

Balaji explained that they set two fundamental tenets before they created the technology. The first was they wanted to make sure that they were building the system in a way that it would be transparently auditable at any time. That means they wanted to make it clear and obvious what was actually going on.

The second tenet is they made a promise to the companies that they are going to market faster. He said that they wanted to make the adoption of the platform very compliant and with open technology standards so that companies can just drop their application in without changing anything.

With these tenets in mind, MedStack continues to improve its security and compliance. It is fully compliant with the standards of multiple regulations including HIPAA, PIPEDA (Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), and PHIPA ( Ontario’s Personal Health Information.)

 In 2018, the company introduced a self-service active compliance system. At the start of this year, the company announced that it has completed its Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 1 audit. The audit was conducted by an independent CPA firm and reported that MedStack meets the SOC 2 Trust Service Principles of security, availability, and confidentiality.

Helping Innovators and Entrepreneurs in Three Ways

MedStack empowers businesses in three ways:

The first is by helping you with all the things you need to prove compliance by having all the policies written and supporting with audits.

The second is by ensuring that you have compliance guarantees to a higher level. Balaji explained that though large techs like Amazon, Google, and Apple offer a certain level of compliance, due to the nature of the platform and broad applicability, they have certain limitations. Your cloud host has to apply security tech to that cloud proposition in line with the policies you need to use for your application. 

The third is a product called MedStack Control by leveraging full real-time access to spin up and down infrastructure, manage network settings directly, and scale container clusters in real-time as needed. 

An Affordable and Fully-Compliant Solution

If you’re looking for a transparent, affordable solution that provides the technology, the solution, the service that you worked so hard to put out there, take a serious look at what MedStack is offering. Have what it takes to play the game. 

Listen to my full interview with Balaji Gopalan here: https://outcomesrocket.health/medstack/2020/04/