Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: ClearDATA CEO Darin Brannan (Part 2)

Darin Brannan: We find providers struggling with adding external web applications to their internal application data environment. They realize that they don’t have the security and compliance and are looking for a way to partner with someone like ClearDATA.

We’ve built as many as 42 different websites for a single hospital system on our cloud-based environment. That’s a great example of some of the challenges that you see across the provider system. Another example is the payer side. That would be the health plans. They have vast amounts of data. They’re seeing consumerization as well. With the advent of value-based care, they need to provide more transparent insights on spending and population health management. They need more transparent insights on spending and population health management.

Getting to that data allows them to draw on all kinds of local and regional information to asses the variations in cost and quality. They are looking to leverage that data and they’re finding that building Big Data environments is non-trivial. They need to work with their current data warehouse to integrate data or build Hadoop-like cloud environments.

In either case, they’re both conducive to running in the cloud because of the pay-as-you-grow scale and reliability factors of the cloud. Working with companies like ClearDATA allows them to leverage the scale of AWS and our compliance and security, and build up that complex environment so they can focus on quality of data in and out.

Sramana Mitra: You provide the infrastructure portion. They’re working with other vendors on the analytics and data warehousing, right?

Darin Brannan: We provide the opinionated architecture and even work with some application vendors as needed to architect their Big Data environments. We help them build it up and manage it over time.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a very specific question in that context. In the payer space, which Big Data vendors are standing out as key solution providers for payer use cases?

Darin Brannan: For the analytics engines?

Sramana Mitra: Yes. The analytics engines have heuristics that are specific to specific domains. That’s the question I’m asking. Which solution providers are you encountering that have very deep domain knowledge to cater to the payer category?

Darin Brannan: It’s a nascent category. I couldn’t give you the specific vendors that are leading the charge there.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s move on to the next segment.

Darin Brannan: In the healthcare technology sector, we have a number of application vendors that are both either homegrown or incumbent healthcare applications. Then there are new SaaS-based applications. Referring to a SaaS application, a good example would be a very strong up-and-coming SaaS technology company that manages over two billion annualized accounts receivable.

They require the devops skillset and the security and compliance skillset to build up this application themselves and manage it over time. They have to make the trade off determination if that’s an investment in personnel or deeper functionality in their software. When they did the analysis, they realized that they should outsource the management of the application and security compliance.

They learned about ClearDATA and we went through the test and pilot. They determined that it was much more efficient to outsource the cloud management side to ClearDATA. They took full advantage of the AWS API consoles along with our devops automation. It also has the benefit of mitigating their compliance risks.

That’s an example I can replicate over and over with many of the SaaS technology companies who may feel that they need to own their own destiny, building out their own software, and realizing that security and compliance is an ongoing journey that requires constant tweaking and true understanding of people, process, and technology around HIPAA requirements.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: ClearDATA CEO Darin Brannan
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