Health Tech
Breakthrough In Healthcare Data
Kristen Valdes Founder & CEO, B.well™
Breakthrough In Healthcare Data Management
“Data is not an asset that companies should have the right to own, health data is personal and should be accessible to the person it matters most to, the individual”, says Kristen Valdes, Founder & CEO, b.well. In the health care world, each company like providers, payers, point solutions, employers have their portal and they try to engage consumers in that individual aspect of their health care experience. It is then up to the customer to browse through numerous apps and find relevant information. As a health care expert, Kristen Valdes observed that lack of transparency of data between the stakeholders has made it difficult for the individuals to manage their health care needs. She was a health care consumer that struggled as her daughter, Bailey, endured a seven year long journey of misdiagnose, expensive procedures, and a near-fatal incident due to non-availability of collated data before Kristen was able to advocate and find her diagnosis. She says, “What I needed – was a place to manage all of her healthcare information and needs in one location. So, I started b.well”.
b.well serves the health care industry by offering employers, payers and health systems an all-in-one integrated platform for consumer engagement, holistic health management, and cost containment. It was a breakthrough in the history of health care data management as until b.well came about there was no neutral, trusted, third party company providing an integrated service that offered a truly customer-centric healthcare experience which was persistent, portable and personalized.
Innovative Design
Most companies racing toward digital transformation do not concentrate on the consumer workflow, yet they expect the customers to have the finest digital experience. b.well primarily focused on the consumer workflow and took inference from their own experiences as a parent and caregiver. Kristen took inputs from consumers from all walks of life, as well as employers, providers, insurance companies and retail organizations that were struggling to define and execute on their digital health strategy . Thus built, b.well has become a platform that unifies a consumer’s complete medical record and is able to leverage real-time information to improve a consumer’s overall health literacy. The hard part is no longer getting access to the data, its what you do with it once you’ve obtained it and cleansed it. The b.well consumer application then puts consumers on a personal health journey by providing insights and information that is relevant to them at that time. It also helps consumers connect with the right solution for them, whether it’s transportation to a visit, access to a doctor in less than 15 minutes, or price shopping their families prescriptions to save money and improve adherence. These conveniences deliver value across the spectrum for consumers.
With this innovative design of all-in-one, b.well has earned a healthy increase in revenue, loyalty and has been able to bring out vast improvement in quality for health care companies across the spectrum. They have seen over 67% continuous active engagements, a 35% decrease in cost to administer health programs, a 20% decrease in health care spend and improved biometrics across the board. Kirsten and her team have proved it is possible to align consumers to evidence-based medicine through a digital format.
Secret Code to Success
Kirsten has established herself as a forward-thinking entrepreneur and visionary in the healthcare space. She believes “team and passion are the key drivers to success”. She is very passionate about the mission of the company and radiates it to her team. She encourages free-thinking and provides opportunities for every member to voice their opinion.
According to her, to be successful in any business it is important to listen to the needs of the target audience. She says, “You cannot design for a patient, caregiver, hospital, employer, or carrier without deeply understanding their pain points, what they are trying to accomplish and their current experience.” She spends a lot of time in the field talking to potential clients and educating the industry on her product. She finds many of the regulations governing healthcare are outdated and actively campaigns and asks other entrepreneurs to ask for changes to make the system less transactional and more experiential.
She feels fear of failure should be there in all entrepreneurs and that will push them to perform better. She says, “ As a leader, we should always believe we’re not doing enough and that someone might catch us; it’s what keeps us pushing hard toward improvement in our space.”
ISSUE 2: Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs of 2019
Health Tech
Viruses: Biological versus Computer
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of us working with computer viruses continue to be amazed at the similarities between the techniques used by the medical community to fight SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease) and the processes involved in our electronic anti-virus systems. Let’s look at some of these similarities, and see how computer anti-virus researchers help protect.
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
What is the Virus?
SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. Essentially, a strand of information wrapped up in a protective shell and a mechanism to infect cells – information, envelope, infection mechanism.
By comparison, a computer virus consists of the payload, a carrier, and an exploit mechanism. For example, the payload would be the malicious code, the carrier an email message, and the exploit mechanism something to take advantage of a vulnerability in a particular mail client. Another example would be script downloaded from a web page, taking advantage of a web browser exploit.
Replication
The virus’s primary purpose is to replicate – to make copies of itself. SARS-CoV-2 does this by infecting cells (in the lungs, stomach, and other areas of the human body), then using the cell’s own mechanisms to make copies of its RNA and make new virus particles.
Computer viruses have the same primary purpose of replication. They want to infect as many hosts as possible. Once in a computer system, they make multiple copies of themselves and transmit out to new hosts. It is this self-replication capability that defines this as a virus.
Identification and Testing
The gold standard for identifying viruses is the whole genome sequence. This maps the full sequence of the chemical components of the RNA (made up adenine, uracil, guanine, and cytosine; abbreviated as A, U, G, and C), and results in a very long string of these four letters. That is excellent for precise identification, but not so good for testing. Due to mutations, what we know of as SARS-CoV-2 is actually a collection of hundreds of different strains of the same fundamental virus, each with their own slightly different sequences (more on this later).
To test for the virus, researchers instead concentrate on relatively small portions of the full sequence. This way, they can extract samples from a potentially infected human, amplify the RNA in the sample to obtain enough to test with, and then compare that against the portion of the full sequence. That is the RT-PCR test.
Computer virus researchers work similarly. The payload of the virus itself is a sequence of computer code that can be expressed in binary, or more commonly in hexadecimal notation. Computer viruses are often intentionally self-encrypted and randomized (we call these polymorphic viruses) to avoid whole sequence detection. Nowadays, these are by far the most common form of computer virus seen.
Researchers extract portions of the sequence that don’t change and use pattern matching techniques to detect those partial sequences in suspicious samples. We call these ‘signatures,’ and they can be effectively used to detect known viruses in suspicious samples.
Immune Response and Vaccination
The human immune system has a component known as the ‘adaptive’ immune system. The system works by identifying portions of viruses already in the body, and creating antigen-specific cells designed to identify, remember, and attack that specific antigen. These cells protect against future infections of the same virus and can survive in the body for some time (months, or years, typically). This is why after you’ve had the measles once, for example, you usually don’t get it again. Vaccinations work by purposely injecting the body with antigens that will generate such an adaptive immune response, to protect you from future specific infections.
Computer anti-virus systems store databases of signatures of known viruses. When your computer receives a new file, it can scan it, look for a match against those signatures, and take action if a match is found (quarantine, etc.). Such signature-based systems are the computer equivalent to the body’s adaptive immune system.
Innate Immune Response
Another component in the human immune system is known as ‘innate.’ This system can detect what is not ‘you’ (what is ‘foreign’) and attack the invader. It relies on the antigen’s chemical properties and doesn’t need to have previously seen that specific antigen.
For computer anti-virus, this is extremely hard to achieve well. The capability to detect and block previously unknown viruses is what differentiates good anti-virus systems from the poor. Various techniques are used, but mostly revolve around a) decoding the virus code to the rawest form, b) detecting suspicious encoding or exploit behavior, and c) using emulation or sandboxing techniques to see what the virus does when executed. Looking at behavior, rather than code sequences.
Mutations and the Future
RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 are very poor at accurate replication, and sometimes the copies made are not perfect. Base pairs get flipped. Portions of the sequence are lost. Parts of other viruses are incorporated. Before long, you are dealing with bad copies of bad copies of a bad copy. It is like the story of a million monkeys with a million typewriters, eventually producing the works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes these viral mutations are beneficial to the virus, but most often not. Whatever the outcome, these mutations are the way the virus adapts to further its goal of replication.
Thankfully, we do not see the same with computer viruses. A computer virus can and does make perfect copies of itself, 100% of the time. Sure, we have self-encrypting polymorphic computer viruses, and randomizing fragments are often introduced, but the core code of the virus is not changed, and certainly not randomly. Perhaps in time, we will see this, but with today’s non-forgiving computer CPU architectures, it is unlikely to be a successful approach.
Of course, given enough monkeys and enough typewriters, anything is possible. Perhaps they can even improve on Shakespeare. Before that day comes, however, make sure you are prepared. Subscribe to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) that can adapt, and protect you from cyber threats.
