Cleerly partners with ClearDATA to keep patient health data secure

Cleerly uses AI to identify the features of plaques that may cause heart attacks

Published February 14, 2023  |  Vator  |  By Steven Loeb

Cybersecurity is important to every industry, but none more so than in healthcare, which is some of the most personal information you can get on a person. Yet, nearly 50 million Americans had their protected health information breached in 2021, a threefold increase in three years.

This is an expensive problem too: according to the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021, published by IBM Security and Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach in the healthcare industry is $9.23 million, which is higher than the global average cost of $4.24 million across all industries.

“Protected health information is among our most private, personal, and valuable data, and bad actors around the globe are increasingly targeting the healthcare and digital health companies that are its stewards. However, it can take a tremendous amount of resources and very specialized expertise to protect the cloud infrastructure where that data lives,” Nick Nieslanik, CTO of Cleerly, a company that uses artificial intelligence to identify the features of plaques that may cause heart attacks, told VatorNews.

“Health data is the most valuable, most vulnerable, most targeted data in the world. Its compromise has multiple victims, as companies struggle to pay millions or even billions in fines. Individuals may bear the burden of financial fraudulent claims and identity theft, catastrophic medical errors, or even the interruption of emergent medical services due to hospital systems being brought down.”

That’s why the company announced a partnership on Tuesday with ClearDATA, a managed cloud, compliance and cyber defense provider for the healthcare industry, to keep its data safe and protected.

As per this partnership, ClearDATA spun up a new account in AWS that could scale 10x, allowing Cleerly to expand its engineering team and capacity.

With ClearDATA’s help, Cleerly’s engineering team now spends 20% or less of their time on security and compliance-related activities; that means that, since partnering with ClearDATA, Cleerly’s product development team has tripled its capacity and saved its engineers over 4,300 hours of cyber security compliance management.

This had freed the company up to focus on innovation, getting closer to its mission of eradicating heart disease, Nieslanik said.

“ClearDATA is the first and most comprehensive provider of healthcare-specific managed cloud, compliance, and cyber defense services backed by proprietary technology. The company enables the industry to harness that data and to enable it to be accessed at the right time by the right people – modernizing healthcare and improving patient outcomes,” he said.

Founded in 2017, Cleerly’s platform is aimed at every stakeholder in the care pathway, including imaging physicians, clinicians, patients, and payers. It includes a data visualization platform to improve the understanding of heart disease, patient-facing educational solutions, and automated data curation. It’s also able to deliver coronary results in as quickly as one hour.

The platform uses AI and machine learning that is based on millions of annotated lab images, which the company used to build more than two dozen algorithms, which are capable of quantifying and characterizing the presence, extent, severity and type of coronary artery disease and other cardiovascular disorders.

Recently, the company launched a second product, called Cleerly Compare, which allows the AI to do direct comparative analysis on more than one scan to see how much disease has progressed over time, allowing doctors to have comprehensive, personalized data of individual disease so that they can start treatment an early as possible.

ClearDATA is supporting Cleerly with the expansion of their total addressable market, while also helping reach new providers that required SOC 2, Nieslanik explained.

“By leveraging ClearDATA’s certifications and support, Cleerly was able to accelerate the preparation for their SOC 2 certification by six months and execute within the first 12 months,” he said.

“In parallel, ClearDATA professional services helped facilitate scaling Amazon Web Service environments.”

(Image source: scarlettcybersecurity.com)