With the pandemic taking most of the community and health entities of the globe unprepared, there is a rising concern on how -and if even if- health data is being collected in a responsible and trustworthy way. We at PEGASI identified this concern five years ago and developed a solution that helps healthcare service providers, both in the public and private sectors, to collect and analyze data in order to generate early alerts of endemic diseases, epidemic outbreaks and common diagnoses on a regional basis.
When shifting to the hybrid cloud, one of the challenges we faced was how to ensure data security and privacy. Due to the participation of many stakeholders in sanitary processes – patients, physicians, clinics, regulatory entities, partners and third parties - there is a high concern on data usage, storage and management. Therefore, we at PEGASI, unlike other healthtech companies, decided to follow the best standards and norms for data protection currently in place for the health sector.
PEGASI encourages strict compliance of the American Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA. According to the CDC, to comply with HIPAA, entities must "ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all electronic protected health information, detect and safeguard against anticipated threats to the security of the information, protect against anticipated impermissible uses or disclosures and certify compliance by their workforce"1. To meet these requirements, it is necessary to partner with a cloud services provider that understands data protection, privacy, and security while ensuring complete reliability for healthcare information. This is what drove our decision to partner with IBM, as their LinuxONE machine is like the Fort Knox of IT infrastructure. We were excited to learn that IBM’s LinuxONE machine is the most secure server in the world. While having an on-premises solution was not feasible for a variety of reasons, we stumbled upon a way to still use that same machine but operate in the cloud.
IBM allows companies like us to follow the highest security standards to create, receive, maintain, and transmit protected sanitary information in a safe manner. With IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services, PEGASI has been able not only to seamlessly comply with HIPAA, but to reduce time and effort spent on meeting these requirements. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services runs off a LinuxONE machine while still being in the cloud.
Our IT leaders believe Hyper Protect is the right platform to work with, as it ensures highly secure workloads, encryption everywhere for internal and external threats, security layers, and strong foundations. Who doesn’t want to build their workloads on the most secure server in the world and showcase this attribute when going through extensive security reviews with customers? It’s a major selling point for our end customers, because they know we take data protection, privacy, and security seriously in our business. It’s one of our most strategic objectives as a business…protecting customer sensitive data.
The IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services product provides a cost-effective solution for compliance while maintaining incredible performance rates, by reducing configuration, deployment, and optimization times by 30%, compared to other cloud services providers we have implemented before. With fully available and efficient resources, and a support team that has felt like in-house staff have provided us with both instant and complete responses whenever we have a question about ANYTHING. Our partnership is the perfect match from several standpoints, including collaboration, thought leadership, technical competence, and going above and beyond to protect our customers’ sensitive data.
With the help of IBM, what used to be a challenge became the strength of PEGASI...one of the few companies in the Latin American health sector that complies with the highest standards on data protection. We have been thrilled to minimize wasted hours and resources for our product team when it comes to trying to learn a new cloud while also discovering the best way to remain compliant with regulatory requirements. This has freed us to make healthcare information even more accessible, clear, and useful for patients, physicians, and service providers in the developing world.
If you have an opportunity to join the Accelerator, we highly encourage joining Melissa and Aaron on their road to adding 100 startups to their program. Applications open soon and can be found right here on the Accelerator Hub. Don’t’ forget to sign up so you do not miss any of their events, blogs, discussion forums, or any other important information about both Hyper Protect and the program.
Your friends at PEGASI.