Health Tech
Making Healthcare Easy
Tanveer Patel, Co-Founder & CEO, Concert Care
Making Healthcare Easy
Digitization has crawled into every phase of healthcare. As consumers of healthcare are gaining more medical knowledge, the demand for better service and outcomes is increasing like never before; and the only means to meet this need is through technology. “The best way to deliver healthcare to all at high quality is to be preventative and reach the consumers early before they need it,” notes Tanveer Patel, Co-Founder and CEO of ConcertCare. Believing in the same principle, Tanveer founded ConcertCare with an aim to alleviate the pain of healthcare providers and efficiently improve their clinical and operational outcomes.
Recognized as one of the nation’s Top 100 Influential Thinkers, Tanveer brings two decades of successful business ventures partnering healthcare and information technology. Injecting her experience and expertise into ConcertCare’s solutions, “Our goal is to simply restore the link between quality patient care, access to care, efficiency of care and provider profitability.” Their consulting services and integrated, user-friendly technology solutions streamline and automate the painstaking often redundant tasks involved in practice management. The solutions help healthcare providers practice, regain their focus and ensure the best possible patient outcomes. Their mobile-first telemedicine platform, CareConnect, is an industry leader and one-stop-shop for telemedicine and telehealth solutions. It is a state-of-the-art, secure, cloud-based, and HIPAA-compliant telemedicine platform that allows physicians to schedule a virtual meet with their patients to accommodate their busy schedules. It maximizes the number of patients seen with fewer missed appointments, which results in increased practice revenue and a competitive marketplace advantage. The platform can be integrated with a variety of EMRs or can be used standalone. “Our plan now is to develop the application for future 5G technology when it becomes widely adopted and available.”
“We create diverse, complex, web and mobile solutions to make every healthcare professional’s life easy.” For instance, NursingPal is an employee-friendly platform that provides nurses with all the information needed to provide excellent medical care to their patients. With its digital informatics, it is a cost-effective tool that is fully integrated with other core functions of clinical and information system. The time and cost consumed in patient handover and documentation process (printing and paper) can be saved using the NursingPal, ultimately leading to effective patient care. Moreover, nurses can also schedule their leaves and shift timings using the tool.
With a diverse customer base, the company’s experienced and knowledgeable software development team adds value to any business from the design of a customized platform to a mobile app. Over the next couple of years, ConcertCare wants to position themselves to strategically grow nationally and globally. They intend to grow organically and through acquisitions. “EMR companies are constantly looking for added value for their current and future clients.” According to Tanveer, “We are poised for a buyout once the market matures.” It is a known fact that her business acumen and her expertise in growing companies, managing risk, and developing international relationships are major keystones that make ConcertCare to have a long-term commitment to its clients and to the excellence of its services.
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.
