Sponsored Post

Q&A with Datica CEO and co-founder Jeremy Pierotti

Datica's CEO discusses the impact of the company's acquisition of Sansoro Health and how that's helping its cloud compliance solution mitigate the complexity and risk of integrating and using patient data in the cloud.

Datica CEO and co-founder Jeremy Pierotti

Datica, a health IT business with a fully managed, end-to-end cloud compliance solution, got its start six years ago. Since then it has evolved into a company to be reckoned with. In an interview, Datica CEO and co-founder Jeremy Pierotti discusses the recent merger with Sansoro Health in 2019 and how that
enables Datica to now offer the most complete, cloud compliance solution available by mitigating the complexity and risk of integrating and using patient data in the cloud.

Can you give an overview of your company and the services you provide?

Datica offers a complete, single platform that solves health IT integration and compliance challenges. We help hundreds of customers achieve cloud compliance, integrate securely with hospital and clinic EHRs, and focus on what they are best at – building and delivering innovating healthcare applications.

Leveraging patient data and context has become essential to deliver effective digital health solutions that improve outcomes and reduce costs. Datica simplifies and speeds the development process for those that need end-to-end security and scalability.

What have been some major milestones for the business over the past 18 months?

The Datica and Sansoro merger brings new and exciting product advancements. First, we announced our new integration platform – Datica Integrate. This combines the best integration technologies into a new, single solution that provides flexibility for customers to combine standards-based integrations, like HL7 v2 and FHIR, with custom integrations based on our proprietary API.

Datica has also been able to productize cloud compliance in unique ways. By offering end-to-end cloud-managed services, you can scale and grow at your own pace, without worrying about the complexity of cloud HIPAA compliance and HITRUST certification. You are free to choose any HIPAA-eligible AWS service, and we will help you to ensure compliance.

You have said that healthcare organizations are recognizing that the cloud brings access to a whole new set of tools for data analytics, mobility, and integrating many different types of data from many different sources. You noted that you can’t develop software with those features using an on-premise architecture. Could you unpack that a bit?

Healthcare has been slow to adopt the cloud, but it is now happening at a very rapid pace. This is driven by the expectations of health IT users – clinicians, specifically. For example, we all know and understand how much more effective we are in life when we have mobile applications that integrate data from
different sources – location, order history, time of day, and other situational context.

None of this is possible without running in a cloud environment. And the number of Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools that are relevant for healthcare has exploded in the last two years. All this brings health IT capabilities that are simply unavailable when operating in an on-premise world.

AI seems to be the buzziest word in healthcare at the moment and also faces a lot of challenges for mainstream adoption. What kind of conversations is Datica having around this topic with healthcare organizations and internally?

It’s everywhere, and as healthcare continues to move to the cloud, it will only increase. We are constantly working with our customers on this. Generally, the conversation starting point is health data integration. You simply cannot make AI/ML a reality without access to tremendous amounts of data. Integrating this data from varied sources, in varied data formats, is tremendously challenging.

By helping customers solve this, we enable them to continue devoting resources to advancing their AI capabilities, instead of spending time and energy trying to find ways to manage data integrations and understand EHR workflows. Unfortunately, many people underestimate this challenge and wait too long in their development process to dive in, at which point extra work or rework may emerge. Recently, Dr. Dave Levin, Datica’s Chief Medical Officer, spoke at the Health 2.0 conference on this topic – the need to think about data integration and clinical workflows as early as possible because it is an absolute necessity to anyone who has AI/ML as a key component of their value proposition.

Could you point out some examples of companies trying to roll out innovative healthcare tools colliding with compliance issues? What are some of the common challenges you see?

The most common example we see are the companies with massive, and quickly increasing amounts of data. The amount of health data is overwhelming. The most common challenges faced are finding efficient ways to secure that data both in transit and at rest.

Another good example are companies that have global aspirations. Being HIPAA compliant is challenging. Being GDPR compliant is challenging. Being compliant with both simultaneously is incredibly complex. As the number of rules associated with each grows – a near certainty – the complexity will grow at a rapid pace. Fortunately, HITRUST provides controls which map to all these varied frameworks and regulations. Being HITRUST CSF certified is increasingly the best way to achieve this compliance, and more than ever we are seeing that be mandated by providers and payers when purchasing HIT solutions.

Shares0
Shares0