Background
L7 Informatics’ Enterprise Science Platform (ESP) empowers healthcare and life sciences companies to connect people, processes, and systems to accelerate discoveries and drive precision healthcare.
Traditionally, lab data management has manual processes that involve inputting data into Excel spreadsheets and handling outdated IT systems, which often leads to data living in silos. Using L7 Informatics’ unified ESP reduces human labor, simplifies regulatory review, and improves process throughput. With ESP, lab clinicians can gain full automation, from sample and inventory management to bioinformatics and clinical report generation for diagnostics. ESP allows for capturing data while working remotely from the lab and enabling track and trace, revealing the chain of identity and chain of custody, etc., all in one place. For COVID-19, this translates to automation from getting the nasal swab to generating the clinical report that shows whether a person has tested positive.
Stay on Platform with Microsoft Azure
L7 built their ESP on Azure, as they use several Azure services internally to support business operations such as PowerBI, Virtual Machines, and Microsoft Genomics. “Microsoft has been a great partner from a business perspective; they show a lot of interest in the space we’re in,” Vasu Rangadass, Ph.D., President, and CEO of L7 Informatics. Many of L7’s customers use Microsoft Dynamics cloud, and L7’s partnership with Microsoft gives them the tools they need to integrate their solution into one place and one cloud.
Why ClearDATA
L7 Informatics software product ESP operates in highly regulated environments of life sciences and healthcare. Their customers deploy the L7 Informatics ESP software behind their firewall or a cloud of their choice, letting them manage and host their ESP instance, including sensitive data (PHI/PII). However, as they expand into larger research organizations, while many of these customers have extensive expertise on the clinical side, they lack both the expertise, resources, and for some, even an IT organization, to provide services and manage their environment. A large cancer research institute was interested in using ESP to conduct RNA sequencing but needed help and support to manage the application and keep sensitive data secure to adhere to HIPAA requirements. Additionally, like many providers, this customer required HITRUST practices and certification.
CEO Rangadass had gone through a HITRUST certification at a previous company and knew the level of effort and rigor required to achieve that type of certification. He wanted to rely on the expertise of a company that understood the importance of keeping PHI protected and had the credentials to prove it. L7 partnered with ClearDATA to help manage the security and compliance for their customer’s Azure environment and enforce adherence to HIPAA.
In addition to assuring customers that a HITRUST-certified organization manages their environment, L7 Informatics can focus on their initiatives as a software company. At the same time, ClearDATA Comply™ enforces HIPAA compliance to keep data secure and protected. Over 30 days, ClearDATA Comply automated safeguards performed, on average, over 15,000 evaluations of more than 500 assets against multiple technical controls and automatically remediated 108 non-compliant assets. This feature lets the team focus on using and developing in the Azure cloud instead of developing a compliance process to keep the data safe and secure.
Before using Comply, DevOps Engineer Chris Burke used to manage the configuration of Azure services on his own, manually. “Setting it up isn’t the hard part,” says Burke, “but making sure it’s secure is time-consuming.”
With Comply, Burke can focus on software delivery and the lifecycle of the ESP product, from CICD to production, rather than navigating through the complexities of compliance and cloud. With ClearDATA, “It’s peace of mind,” says Burke.
ClearDATA Comply also provides robust, customizable reporting that visualizes the compliance status of an environment over time across different cloud services, environments, and even different standards and regulations. With Comply, Senior Director of Solutions Consulting Jeff McDaniel can send reports to their customer to prove their environment adheres to HIPAA regulations and their sensitive data is secure. “I reference the reporting weekly and send a summary view to our customers. It’s an efficient way to capture and trend the security of a site,” says McDaniel. The L7 executive team also uses the Comply Compliance Dashboard reports as an internal and external proof point of adherence to HIPAA regulatory requirements. And pairing Comply with Services, L7 Informatics can rely on the healthcare security expertise from ClearDATA to keep their customer’s environment secure 24/7 while adhering to ISO and HIPAA requirements.
“It becomes very complex to manage these things…having a third-party watch what we do is valuable, especially as we grow,” says McDaniel.
ClearDATA Comply: Compliance Dashboard Sample Azure Report
ClearDATA’s HITRUST certification with Comply software and Services helped enable L7 to gain the business of the respected cancer research institute. “It’s table-stakes—and it’s allowed us to move forward and win the business that we have,” says McDaniel. “There is a lot of embedded knowledge/IP that we don’t have to worry about.”
