Article

Catalyze – HIPAA Compliant Cloud Computing for Healthcare

Bernhard Kappe

Published on: September 22nd, 2015

This post was previously on the Pathfinder Software site. Pathfinder Software changed its name to Orthogonal in 2016. Read more.

We asked Travis Good, Co-founder at Catalyze to write a guest post with his perspective on the space:

We founded Catalyze a little over a year ago to solve compliance issues arising from healthcare, technology and data storage. It’s a very domain-specific problem, and many people outside of the healthcare industry don’t truly understand what it entails from the perspective of technology, development or healthcare innovation.

My co-founder and I had experienced challenges related to compliance, hosted technology, storage and data processing first hand at a previous company, so these were problems we really wanted to solve.

In the process of building that first company, we ran into some roadblocks and discovered that compliance was an even larger problem than we’d thought. So, we wanted to create a solution that allowed healthcare startups to succeed in selling and distributing their applications to providers and patients without the stress of jumping compliance hurdles.

Cloud storage is such a simple solution to so many data and information storage issues, and it is now used across multiple industries. However, the healthcare industry has its own set of rules and regulations that can make utilizing cloud storage tricky.

At Catalyze, we developed a solution to make modern cloud-based technologies compliant with healthcare regulations like HIPAA. Our platform provides clients with best-practice cloud-based technologies from encryption, application logging and system data to disaster recovery and vulnerability scanning, all in a healthcare compliant environment. This relieves any developer or vendor from having to worry about compliance issues because everything hosted on our platform has all of the technologies and unique requirements to comply with healthcare regulations. When selling to hospitals and other clients, customers can be confident and rest assured that the data is safe within regulations, so they’re able to turn compliance into an asset, or a differentiator, and reduce the time it takes to sell into larger enterprises.

Although Catalyze is still a new company, it’s been really surprising to see the overwhelming demand for a service like ours. As a startup, a year is a lifetime in certain respects, but as a health care startup, it’s hard to accomplish too much off the bat due to regulatory requirements and risk averse entities like hospitals and life insurance companies. But the amount of inbound demand that we’ve received has allowed us to get much further along than we ever thought we’d be at this point.

We originally conceived Catalyze as a purely technology-focused company offering a subscription-based software that would help healthcare developers, enterprises and vendors. That shifted once we became more engaged in the marketplace, allowing us to differentiate Catalyze in two specific ways.

Our customers told us they needed technical expertise to build secure cloud-based systems, but we learned that what they really needed was a combination of specific expertise in healthcare compliance and cloud-based technology. This is what would differentiate us from our competitors. So we tackled this head on. We learned all about HIPAA, healthcare regulations and other aspects that our technology doesn’t necessarily cover. A lot of our customers and prospects now see us as a compliant partner, which is something we strive to be. We’re happy to help our customers however we can.

Catalyze has stayed true to its mission to make it easier and faster for developers to build and sell healthcare technology. Since its founding, we’ve learned a lot, specifically about the types of features, technology solutions and ways we can solve problems and really deliver on our mission. An interesting by-product of Catalyze is that we’re helping the healthcare market to become more agile and flexible. By offering a simpler way to build compliant applications and distribute compliant technology, we help our customers and the market operate in a leaner way.

And while we don’t advertise it, we certainly help our customers and clients potentially learn even faster and cheaper than they would otherwise. We think that’s really powerful and important in a regulated industry. The ability to be more lean and agile, and adapt more quickly without having to spin in circles and waste time on compliance is one of the things we are able to bring to our customers, and hopefully to more companies in the healthcare field.

Until now, we’ve been largely focused on vendors, developers, and startups, but in the future, we’ll head into the enterprise side, selling into health insurers, hospitals and healthcare provider systems. The enterprise side is now looking to build applications that empower their academic center clinicians and researchers to build and test new technology. Many academic centers are trying to commercialize new technologies, and we plan to be a player by powering a lot of innovation initiatives. We’re already in the game with a large payer, but we’ll soon expand with additional payers and academic centers in order to really help drive innovation within these organizations.