Securing Healthcare in the Cloud

by Darin Brannan
Co-founder and CEO
ClearDATA

Today, I’m wrapping up our Q1 all hands with a team that has grown to more than 200 talented individuals. As we reflect on the victories and challenges of 2019, I’m especially pleased to be heading into the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this weekend. What a great way to kick start the new year and the new decade! The conference is now in its 38th year, and I’ve been to the last five. It’s exciting to look forward to being surrounded by the leading industry analysts and healthcare investors, and to have a chance to interact and learn from these thought leaders who have a profound effect on our industry.

I think 2020 is going to be a historical year for healthcare, and I’m honored to be among the two dozen or so private companies invited to present at the conference. We are on the precipice of real and meaningful change in the healthcare industry, and frankly we can’t change fast enough. We have come to that “perfect storm” where the amount of healthcare data we have to use, transmit, and store is literally exploding, and at the same time we have incredibly exciting advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence that hold the key to gaining actionable insights from these data sets. Literally every day there is some new exciting advancement in healthcare, be it in machine learning, genomics, precision medicine, cybersecurity technology, or longevity.

Consumers are screaming for more personalized user-friendly interfaces and healthcare is answering the call. We are seeing everything from in-home devices that allow us to interact with medical professionals, to better natural language processing tools that turn our medical history in an electronic medical record into a holistic view of our health that travels with us. It’s all designed for our care givers and providers to use to get us the care we need when we need it.

But with this big data comes big challenges, and as J. P. Morgan will tell you, this is the year we are more concerned than ever before about the privacy, security, and compliance needs in healthcare. Rightly so. The numbers are in (and I will share them in my presentation) but suffice it to say 2019 was a dismal year in protecting healthcare data. The industry can do better, and we must. Innovation is critical to the wellness of the country and world, but so is protecting patient records from increasing cyberthreats.

The digital transformation of healthcare is underway, and with it comes a unique historical tension to move from antiquated, proprietary and often aged and/or broken infrastructures that provide haunting stories of mortality due to medical misdiagnosis and errors. We must move swiftly and strategically into the public healthcare cloud where we can innovate, scale with agility, find necessary cost optimizations, maximize the potential of ML and AI, and do it all with privacy and security at the core.

The trends are exciting. What I find most exciting is knowing I’ll have a chance to talk about how ClearDATA has spent the last decade preparing for this moment in history. I’ll be sharing how we are helping providers, payers, life sciences, and innovative SaaS and product developers leverage exciting trends without increasing their privacy and security risks.

Join me Tuesday, Jan. 14 at 1:30 PST in Elizabethan D, Westin St. Francis, and let’s talk about how to change healthcare in 2020 so five or ten years from now history has a dramatically successful story to tell about healthcare’s digital transformation.

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