What Unique Healthcare Challenge is Tausight Looking to Solve? (Video Transcript)

Bill Russell (Interviewer): I’m going to go to the question that, you’ve done this before; you were co-founder of Imprivata and CTO as well. I’m going to ask you the question I asked before we started the interview, which is why not retire? I mean, co-founder of Imprivata, Imprivata did quite well. So why not retire?

David Ting (Tausight CTO and Founder): So one of the enjoyable things I had was talking to a lot of CIOs and I recognize the complexities of the healthcare system. I recognize the line that when you’ve seen one healthcare system, you’ve seen one healthcare system. I recognize that it is not an easy environment to secure, and it’s not one where conventional tools can do the job. It’s one where you need multiple tools. And Aaron and I have had many conversations about this. What we wanted to do in starting Tausight was how do we build a focus tool just for healthcare, that worries about securing your clinical workflow, but taking into consideration all the other things that you need to do. Our goal is not replace all your tools. Our goal is to give you a better perspective at managing how you secure clinical workflow, starting with understanding where your PHI data is, how it’s secured, how it’s being used, where it’s moving to and the ecosystem around that PHI.

How do I defend all your applications? Now frankly, I tell people if my Amazon music application is compromised on my system by rogue software, I really don’t care in a healthcare setting. If there’s a piece of software that’s supposed to be touching PHI and it is compromised, I want to know about it immediately. If there’s a system that can be compromised that will affect the availability of that machine I need – because PHI is being used and the clinicians using it, I want to be alerted and I want to be able to deal with it from that perspective. So when I saw the needs, we talked a little bit about fact that I was on the cybersecurity task force and we saw the complexity. And just as we are about to publish the findings, WannaCry hits in May of 2016. And all of a sudden, the HHS focuses completely on how does US healthcare systems protect against WannaCry.

And I had also European customers who got hit by WannaCry who said, we are helpless. We watched our screens turn red and we didn’t even know what happened. And we went on the overhead pager and told the staff to unplug, just power off the computers as fast as they could. To me, that was an indication that as an infrastructure, we didn’t have the right tools. We didn’t have situational awareness that would give somebody an alert that says, machines are running, there are processes running on our machines that you guys don’t know about. There are things that are compromising the availability of the environment. We also saw tons of breaches; applications that were exfiltrating PHI data. Well, why couldn’t you see those? How do 80 million records slide out of a healthcare system sight unseen?

If they were in paper records, I calculated that if every patient record weighed a good four ounces in a jacket, it would be couple hundred thousand pounds of paper you had to exfiltrate. And yet, people steal them. It’s electronic, there’s no mass. I wanted to say, how do we do this better? How do we create a better tool for healthcare? And the team that we recruited are all people from the healthcare industry. They all have the same passion. And when you get a bunch of people like Aaron and other folks telling you, “Hey, this is the right thing to do.” And you go, “Yeah, this is newer technologies available, things that weren’t available even five years ago.” We talk about the advanced uses of machine learning. We talk about the power of the cloud. We talk about the analytics capabilities. We talk about IOT technology and the ability to transfer information compactly. Mostly, we talk about the increasing computing power that we have on the endpoint and the ability now to deploy AI, right to the edge. So, the ability to run AI right at the endpoint to do things that you couldn’t do even five years ago. TensorFlow, all the technologies that we have today are just far more advanced than what we had certainly five, six years ago. And so, the culmination of all that basically said, you can’t retire. Besides, I basically sat around and my wife says, you got to do something.