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Synzi is a virtual care company dedicated to providing better ways for providers and payers to engage colleagues, patients and members simply and efficiently. Their mission is to deliver technology to the healthcare industry that drives better access of care to patients and members through the advancement of a state-of-the-art communication platform. Synzi’s telehealth technology enhances the telehealth and home health marketplace by bringing together various communication methods to help enable better performance for healthcare organizations, better access for patients, and better outcomes for all.
Synzi is working to help patients get access to the right care at the right time, bringing convenience and peace of mind to patients and members. Home health and virtual care organizations are under an increasing amount of pressure to achieve business goals. The new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) will be enacted on January 1, 2020. This new model shifts the financial burden onto home health organizations, placing increased pressure on them to provide more care with fewer committed dollars. Essentially, these organizations must find a way to deliver the same quality of care more cost effectively and provide an experience that leaves patients highly satisfied. Synzi’s platform helps these home health organizations do just that, by empowering providers, nurses, and care managers to communicate with their patients through a variety of digital tools and telehealth technology like video and mobile, enabling more efficient and secure virtual communication and care.
Figure 1: Synzi’s HIPAA-Compliant Secure Messaging
The Challenge
Because Synzi’s telehealth technology platform handles patients’ PHI, the team needed to develop on a platform that is both scalable and secure to ensure that the care managers and providers communicating with patients do so securely. When it came to developing Synzi’s platform, Synzi Chief Experience Officer Mark Knudsen knew he wanted to leverage the public cloud from the company’s inception. Knudsen had extensive experience in healthcare and cloud, and he understood the value of using the cloud to build and scale. Knudsen chose to build the communication platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) based on prior experience and familiarity with the cloud platform.
Many smaller health organizations lack the resources necessary to monitor their own compliance. Consequently, Knudsen and his team knew that ensuring compliance for their telehealth technology platform would be paramount for these home health organizations to lower their own risk of engaging in noncompliant communications with patients, such as sending and receiving PHI through personal text messages rather than through a platform that protects the exchange of PHI. Additionally, as Synzi continues to scale to serve large enterprises, awareness and proof of compliance becomes even more critical for building and maintaining trust with customers.
The Solution
Having worked with ClearDATA previously, Knudsen looked to ClearDATA from the start. With ClearDATA, Knudsen said, Synzi “gains validation on our approach to developing the platform, without having to build it from scratch ourselves.” Knudsen appreciates that ClearDATA acts as a trusted advisor, helping Synzi determine the best way to use AWS services to keep its telehealth platform compliant and its sensitive data secure. “Working with ClearDATA was a great way to design a secure and compliant application from the beginning, leveraging the insight and expertise that the ClearDATA architects provide in that process,” said Knudsen.
Synzi finds a great deal of value in ClearDATA’s Automated Safeguards. For Knudsen, Automated Safeguards serve as one more peace of mind, from an operational perspective, to ensure that all of Synzi’s services are secure and running up-to-date. Moreover, Automated Safeguards allow Synzi’s technical operations team to concentrate on internal development, while ClearDATA focuses on DevOps “blocking and tackling,” through the software automation of backups, anti-virus, encryption, and audit logs.
Synzi is currently in the midst of a SOC 2 audit, so the virtual care company can gain a certification for SOC 2 compliance. The Compliance Dashboard has helped Synzi throughout this audit, enabling the team to document and view how they are managing their telehealth technology. By sharing the credentials and capabilities of their partner, ClearDATA, Synzi can speak confidently to the security of their telehealth platform and how it is managed. Synzi’s team also gained operational efficiencies and can focus more on their core competencies since ClearDATA takes care of building out a compliance dashboard as well as automation around configuring and keeping services compliant. As Synzi continues to grow and scale, the organization finds value in the fact that ClearDATA will scale along with them and continue supporting their innovative telehealth and home health efforts by keeping them safe and secure.
To learn more about Synzi, watch an on-demand webinar hosted by ClearDATA Co-Founder & Former CTO Matt Ferrari and Chief Experience Officer Mark Knudsen, Maintaining Compliance for Virtual Care and Telehealth Platforms in the Cloud.
