Health Tech
Creating impeccable recovery experiences
Maximillian Jaffe, Co-Founder & COO, WeRecover
Creating impeccable recovery experiences
“I consider myself to be a pitbull that just won’t quit,” says Maximillian Jaffe, Co-Founder & COO WeRecover. The company provides a transparent search engine service for addiction treatment resources. Flaunting a blend of curiosity, tenacity, and stamina in the right proportions, Jaffe is a strategic leader in the making. Jaffe’s attitude towards leadership is profoundly inspiring as he believes in surrounding oneself with the most intelligent people who have the intense potential to breathe life into their ideas. He believes in paying equal attention to speed and direction as speed in the wrong direction is a killer for any early stage company.
Nudged by personal dismay
WeRecover was born due to a visceral personal experience Jaffe had when he was trying to get his sister into rehab. “The process to get her admitted into the appropriate care was one of the most tumultuous nightmares of my life,” says Jaffe. The experience inspired him to build a platform to get the appropriate help with ease and hence WeRecover was born as a product of passion and tenacity. “Dealing with life and death situations is scary enough. The added stress of trying to deal with inefficient healthcare processes and confusing costs shouldn’t be an added stressor,” says Jaffe.
Cusp of a Paradigm shift
Digital transformation is making significant strides in the healthcare industry and Jaffe desires to make the most of the opportunity. According to Jaffe, advancements in big data, mobile workforces, and innovation in pricing models are all laying the groundwork for a massive shift in how healthcare services are rendered and solicited. However, there is a lack of a standardized lexicon between payers, providers, and disparate technology vendors on the other side of the coin- which has now become one of the biggest challenges in the healthcare industry. Also, the providers need to be equipped with simple user interfaces to identify options that meet both the clinical and financial needs of the patient.
Transparency is imperative
Transparency is unarguably one of the biggest challenges in the healthcare industry. Jaffe feels that there are colossal amounts of gaps in terms of how things are diagnosed by clinicians, how that gets coded into billing workflows, and ultimately how that gets translated into patient financial responsibility. If we move towards a world where costs of healthcare services and reimbursements are clearly understood upfront and in an automated fashion, this would result in meaningful innovation across healthcare verticals. The key players of the healthcare ecosystem would be equipped to decrease costs and increase the quality if the variables were better understood and made more transparent.
Making everyday a Heyday
To Jaffe, success is about making care accessible. He considers helping an emotionally run-down mother of three, who were all addicted to heroin, as one of his most successful moments. WeRecover helped get all three of her children into different rehabs. They are now happily reunited family and Jaffe expressed that he is still in touch with them. Success is possible with the right help.
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.
