Health Tech
A Leader Who Cares
Gerry Miller, Founder & CEO, Cloudticity
A Leader Who Cares
“The older I get, the more I realize how much I have to learn,” says Gerry Miller, Founder & CEO, Cloudticity. He keeps an open mind, listens and surrounds himself with people who he can learn from. Miller is a responsible person who understands what is important and beautifully manages every aspect of his life in the right way. He gives his team the right amount of support, his family enough time and his company generous amounts of care. According to Miller, self-awareness and good decision making are inevitable to success. “I know the buck stops with me, so I work hard to present a clear vision and make the hard decisions as quickly as possible,” he says. The inquisitive leader also gives his team the freedom of decision making with the right blend of support. In the initial stages, he takes the responsibility of setting up the team for success and ensures everyone is equipped enough to work towards the mission. Once everything is set, he lets his people free to make their own decisions and execute their ideas independently.
Balancing work and life in style
Miller starts his day by planning his agenda followed by answering emails. He also answers all the emails before going to bed. “I am an inbox-zero guy,” says Miller. Most of his days are spent on meetings, and he closes each day with a review and self-reflection. His routine also reflects how much importance he gives to ‘work-life-balance” because he makes sure that he spends some quality time with family. Usually, he makes breakfast for his son and enjoys a five-mile walk with the family every day. “Take care of business and humans alike, and remember that you have many teams rooting for you – not just those in your company, but family, friends, customers, and partners,” says Miller.
Finding success in saving lives
One of Miller’s clients had a toddler daughter who was diagnosed with a hairline fracture in her leg bone. Though the orthopedist fixed the fracture, he failed to diagnose that the girl was born with a heart defect, had open-heart surgery, and the hairline fracture was a side effect of the problem reappearing. Fortunately, the HIE they deployed lead them to her cardiologist which eventually saved her life. Miller considers this as his most memorable moment of success.”That brought home the gravity of what we do – and there’s a family I know who didn’t have to go through the unimaginable experience of losing a child,” says Miller.
Miller’s take on digital transformation
“Our healthcare system is severely broken – it’s not designed to care for healthy people, so it’s a sick-care system. There’s something inherently wrong when the sicker you are, the more your doctor gets paid. That’s backward to me. The system consumes 20% of our GDP, yet still kills over 100,000 people each year due to simple errors.” says Miller. According to Miller, a lack of data transparency, excessive regulations, and increasing costs are some of the major reasons why the system is inherently broken.
Digital transformation could be a problem solver as Artificial Intelligence has profoundly minimized the elephantine amount of grunt work involved in the diagnosis. As a result, over 80% of the providers using Electronic health record systems have now prevented an adverse reaction. Using data processing, machine learning models and statistical analysis can keep people healthier and at the same time drop costs dramatically. However, the technologies still have a good scope of improvement in the healthcare space. Certain things like data transparency need to be worked on to get the best of the technologies.
Wrapping it up
He advises the booming entrepreneurs to give their 100%, be persistent and ready to give up anything nurture your venture to success. Failure is inevitable in the journey towards success. According to Miller, we need to stop thinking of failure of a personal deficiency, but as a hypothesis’s falseness when testing your ideas. “Failure is a good thing, and the ability to not take failure personally is probably the single common thread I’ve seen across entrepreneurs,” says Miller.
Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs Of 2020
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.
