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A HIPAA-compliant data integration solution driving innovation and better medical outcomes

Steve Wray is the CEO of CloudMine. Founded in 2011, CloudMind is a HIPAA compliant data enablement platform for healthcare that removes barriers to collaboration between providers and organizations across the industry, thereby driving innovation and providing better outcomes for patients. The platform, which was designed with security, compliance, and scalability in mind, is used by organizations such as Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, Biomeme, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Digitas Health, and many more.

JEFF MACK: How would you describe what your company does, to someone unfamiliar with healthcare technology? What does integrated digital medicine mean for the bottom line?

STEVE WRAY: Integrated digital medicine—let me break it down. We live in a digital world. People are using devices, from a patient perspective, caregiver perspective, provider perspective, healthcare system perspective, and payer perspective. There are organizations who provide digital services and digital content to help feed that ecosystem. There are 10 conditions, Jeff—10—that start with things like cardiovascular health, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, diabetes; just 10 conditions today—the management of those conditions is an annual burden of cost to the US healthcare system of almost $2 trillion. We have to use a Connected Health Cloud to bring some flow to that integrated digital management of disease to really fully leverage what technology can do, what data flows can do, and how connecting not just technology but people could help us to deliver a higher standard of care to lower the cost and improve the outcomes for those prevalent conditions. Connected healthcare is better healthcare.

I am going to draw a physiologic analogy here: connective tissue. When I speak to people in life sciences and healthcare, if I say “connective tissue,” most of them had that in their 101 classes in science. Connective tissue is the most prevalent tissue in your body. It does four things: it perpetuates movement, it provides support, it provides connections, and it also provides protection. If you think about the healthcare system, it’s suffering in all four areas: it doesn’t move very well; it’s not very well supported, depending upon where you stand; it’s certainly not well-connected; and as we’ve learned from recent ransomware attacks that have really targeted healthcare and life sciences, it’s not very well protected.

When you move to a Connected Health Cloud, you actually enable an elevation of all four of those functions. So, being connected in a disconnected state is a really important task to take on today. We make it easy because we address three different levels of need: you need developers who can code the transactions that allow the technology to do its thing; you need the connections to come from strong partnership, and we’ve engineered those partnerships to make it easier for customers to make those technology level connections; and we’ve pre-engineered the security and compliance, which protects privacy, data and the movement across that continuum.

Q. Tell us how the company leverages the Internet of Things.

A. The IoT is a fascinating pioneering field and healthcare is certainly I believe one of the most important aspects. Look, we can talk about self-driving cars, but in many instances, even when you’re behind the wheel, there’s IoT all over most vehicles that were built in the last five years; there’s data flying everywhere. That, I think, goes passively through most people—they don’t realize it.

In healthcare, the potential is really almost endless but we need to focus. So, here’s the first thing: the potential is that we really now start to allow for a redefinition of what we think is possible in clinical trials. For example, if we’re really actually trying to figure how patients react to a therapy, why don’t we track them through their activities of daily living? We could do that through a wearable, we could do that through mobile applications that they are not passively adding data into, we could do it through the security devices that most people are literally installing in their homes today. There are all sorts of sensors that we could use there, but what I’m excited about and intrigued about—that is the information to come for healthcare—is when you see companies like Under Armour, in performance apparel, starting to put biometric sensors into shirts and sleeves and other things along that line, let’s move that beyond sports performance. Let’s use it for patients who are post-heart attack, patients who are post-stroke—because we’re not tracking them well enough to understand if they’re taking the right behaviors or the right medications in those critical weeks and months following that event—let’s use those apparel passively to track and intervene before we get to a catastrophic event. The same could be said for any postoperative setting—that potential is huge. I’m really excited about the potential for CloudMine’s Connected Health Cloud to allow IoT to be better integrated into this continuum of care.

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ABOUT NEWMARK KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Knight Frank (NKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NKF's 15,000 professionals operate from more than 400 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NKF's strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NKF's full-service platform comprises BGC's real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

NKF is a part of BGC Partners, Inc., a leading global brokerage company servicing the financial and real estate markets. BGC's common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol (NASDAQ: BGCP). BGC also has an outstanding bond issuance of Senior Notes due June 15, 2042, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: BGCA). BGC Partners is led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer  Howard W. Lutnick. For more information, please visit www.bgcpartners.com.

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