Chordline Health (formerly TCS Healthcare Technologies) is on a mission to be the bridge between healthcare, social care, and managed care. Chordline provides clinician-designed software to support all aspects of population health management. With domain knowledge based on being in the managed care space for over thirty year, Chordline products are developed to meet both regulatory and certification requirements.
Chordline’s SaaS product ACUITYnxt™ supports a whole-person approach to care management. This approach integrates clinical, behavioral, and social aspects of a person’s life into a single view for more streamlined and proactive care management. As a SaaS-based product, ACUITYnxt also enables healthcare workers to work remotely—an increasingly valuable feature as healthcare continues to digitize.
Offering a cloud solution and scaling on AWS
Realizing that the market was evolving with some prospective clients desiring a SaaS solution, in 2016 Chordline chose to partner with AWS to add ACUITYnxt to their product offering. Of all three cloud platforms, Chordline was most familiar with AWS and believed it to be the strongest cloud provider in terms of the services offered at the time.
With scalability being a key priority, the Chordline team leverages services such as EC2, S3, and RDS as well as ElastiCache and Elastic Load Balancing to achieve a high level of vertical and horizontal scalability across their solution. By leveraging AWS in these areas, the Chordline team has been able to complete seven releases of the ACUITYnxt solution on time and on budget.
Partnering with ClearDATA for robust compliance reporting and healthcare expertise
Prior to partnering with ClearDATA, Chordline worked with other vendors serving multiple industries to help manage their security and HIPAA compliance. However, while these vendors fulfilled basic requirements, they fell short in terms of the lack of healthcare-specific capabilities in compliance management and reporting. When Chief Operating Officer Matt Fahner was VP of Engineering, he became responsible for managing the security and compliance of their technology. That’s when he decided that first and foremost the company needed to partner with an organization that could not only help them maintain HIPAA compliance, but that also understood and supported their market and industry.
ClearDATA satisfied that need, according to Fahner: “As we were looking to choose a vendor, we determined ClearDATA is very similar to Chordline. Chordline is 100% dedicated to the care management space, and ClearDATA is 100% dedicated to healthcare.” The team also found value in ClearDATA being HITRUST certified.
“Working with a HITRUST certified vendor gives our customers the assurance that their data is in good hands,” says Fahner.
Chordline benefits from the compliance reports generated through ClearDATA’s cloud security posture management (CSPM) CyberHealth™ Platform software, along with automated configuration of technical controls mapped directly to specific HIPAA CFR numbers and automated remediation when a compliance gap is detected. “It’s great that we can see the direct relationship between an at-rest requirement and how Chordline services are compliant not just today, but over the lifecycle or over a period of time,” says Fahner. The platform’s self-service reporting capabilities allow Chordline to send compliance status reports to customers and prospects as needed. The team views this as a considerable benefit, as it enables them to be proactive and responsive to their customers’ needs to prove that the vendors, they work with are managing compliance and risk effectively. As regulatory changes in healthcare continue to ramp up, Mr. Fahner expects customers and prospects to begin proactively seeking more information around compliance and security from their vendors and partners.
Healthcare is increasingly moving outside the four walls, making it critical for care managers to be able to use ACUITYnxt from anywhere, in a secure manner. As Chordline customers continue to grow and their solution expands, managing security and compliance gets more complex.
With CSPM software and managed services, ClearDATA also enables Chordline to scale and serves as an extension of their team, without slowing them down as they develop in the cloud.
Instead of hiring a team of engineers to manage the compliance of their solution, they call on the ClearDATA engineers to provide the assistance they need; thereby keeping costs down and avoiding taking on the burden of compliance. Mr. Fahner states, “the ClearDATA team has really provided guidance and expertise that we didn’t have in-house, to be able to configure and build out infrastructure within AWS, make sure it was hardened after being built, and manage the security. There’s always someone from ClearDATA watching our back.”
Desiring to augment their own HIPAA compliance expertise, Chordline relies on ClearDATA managed services to ensure they are providing a solution that meets HIPAA standards. The software’s self-service capabilities also enable the team to make changes to their environment without the need to submit tickets, thus making updates timelier.
Future State
Chordline’s primary objectives this year are to continue to successfully scale the business to support their growing customer base, to offer ACUITYnxt as a SaaS alternative to existing clients desiring that migration, and to increase the breadth and depth of their analytics offerings in both their product offerings. Chordline will continue working closely with ClearDATA to ensure the necessary controls are in place as they continue to develop on AWS. Mr. Fahner states that as Chordline continues to build out their solutions there is value in leveraging additional services and solutions from ClearDATA.
