Our company, Tausight, provides real-time visibility into Protected Health Information (PHI) activity across all endpoints and servers, delivering situational PHI awareness for the healthcare industry for the first time in history. That’s what we do; now a bit about how we got here.

In 2016, as the founder and then CTO of Imprivata, I was honored to be appointed to the Department of Health and Human Services Healthcare Industry Cybersecurity Task Force. This gave me the privilege of serving alongside twenty-one security, compliance and privacy experts representing a diverse range of public and private healthcare organizations. Each member of the Task Force shared the unified goal of fulfilling Congress’s request to produce what became a fundamental tool for our industry, The Report on Improving Cybersecurity in Healthcare.

When the 21st Century Cures Act was signed into law promising the National Institutes of Health the flexibility and resources needed to accomplish its mission of improving the health of Americans, I recognized that one of its key measures, to enhance data sharing in the interest of improved patient outcomes, was going to require an entirely new approach to securing PHI. The idea of sharing data was counter intuitive to the paradigm that we had relied upon for years in healthcare; protect patient information by restricting its movement to within the firewall, much to the annoyance of clinicians who wanted the flexibility to securely exchange data in the interest of better patient care.

In 2019, I founded Tausight with a mission to provide cyber-resiliency, specifically for PHI – healthcare’s critical asset in this new information-sharing age. This became especially relevant during the pandemic when many clinicians and staff worked remotely. As the world learned to work virtually, so did we. With a distributed group of engineers and scientists, we worked on building the industry’s first situational PHI awareness platform from the ground up, leveraging advances in SaaS, Machine Learning, IoT and cloud analytics. In March, when we were finally able to gather safely in person, we introduced Tausight to the market at ViVE and HIMSS.

Now that we are officially in the market, and hospitals are beginning to benefit from Tausight’s real-time visibility into PHI activity across all their endpoints and servers, inside and outside the perimeter, we are launching this blog to share our ideas, future plans and partnerships, helpful resources and points of view.

One of the first questions that I am often asked is what is the meaning of the name Tausight? I remember telling a friend who is a hospital CIO that the company is named after my son’s favorite Chinese chicken dish – it’s not as that would be Tsao.

Being as nerdy as we are, we used a trigonometry concept of expressing angles as radians with τ (tau – the Greek letter) or 2π representing 360-degrees of visibility into your PHI. τ is also used in Machine Learning to mean statistical correlation or similarity. We appropriately named the company Tausight to depict the full circumferential view of PHI activity, as well as visibility into the level of consistency (security) between an organization’s machines. Hence, the notion of situational PHI awareness. You would never run a manufacturing process without complete visibility into all your systems so why would we want to do that in healthcare where the stakes are even higher.

As Micki Tripathi, our National Coordinator for Health IT, describes so well in his Health Affairs article, “In 2022, the vision of the Cures Act will become a reality and allow us to start to reap the full potential of what a truly digital health care system can do to improve the lives of patients.” It’s time for a new approach to securing the data that we need to share to realize that vision. That’s why we started Tausight – a system designed for healthcare by healthcare.

Thanks for reading! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us to learn more. Or, to see how we can help your organization, book a demo today.