Guest: Shubh Sinha (LinkedIn)
Company: Integral

Integral automates all of the compliance processes necessary to work with healthcare data. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Co-Founder and CEO Shubh Sinha to talk about Integral’s mission, main features, and how it is benefitting current clients and partners.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Many companies want to work with very sensitive healthcare data and combine it with other types of data sources, such as geographic demographic, to get a 360-degree footprint of a customer or a patient. This will help develop better treatments, have more informed messaging, and a variety of other use cases.
• The problem with working with healthcare data, especially sensitive data governed by regulations such as HIPAA, is you’d have to go through lengthy, manual, arduous compliance processes that are typically human-led in the form of consulting.
• Integral is that automation to ensure that companies can seamlessly and compliantly work with healthcare data as quickly as possible for analysis, machine learning, marketing, and other use cases.
• It caters primarily to life sciences and digital healthcare companies, i.e., large pharma, large insurance, as well as Series A/Series B digital healthcare companies. These are on the frontlines of performing very novel, bespoke analytics. They are looking to have patient-centric outreach and development.
• It provides the flexibility and speed that the industry has never really had, primarily because you have to wait on a HIPAA consultant, they give you 8-10 weeks of turnaround, and then you can finally run analytics, then you run a business decision, and then it impacts the consumer. Each of those steps is incrementally delayed because there’s no automated compliance layer. Integral is trying to bridge that gap.
• Integral is a data product that sits on top of a data storage system such as a GCP or AWS or a custom storage solution. It continuously monitors for datasets being uploaded or changes any modification. It flags lack of compliance because it is continuously running privacy risk analyses. Customer fixes the problems. In the UI, the customer can experiment with different data combinations, data iterations, see your compliance score go down or up. Once they get to a sufficiently low level of risk, they can hit the go button. An output is the remediated dataset, as well as all of the compliance documentation, because Integral has automated the end-to-end process and recorded everything.
• The automations were developed in consultation and in collaboration with HIPAA adviser Dr. Bradley Maitland, one of the leading HIPAA consultants for governmental agencies, tech companies, and top pharma companies.
• Integral itself is HIPAA-compliant and follows the right procedures to become HIPAA compliant. Customers have the option to take its software packs into their infrastructure, such that no data ever leaves and all processing happens on site.
• Companies are realizing that there are large data repositories they can leverage, and they have no problem buying that data, analyzing it, and integrating it. The piece that slows things down is how to do it compliantly, how to do it and have privacy, patient trust, while still moving quickly.
• Main differentiators for Integral: 1) healthcare and big data expertise, with company founders coming from big pharma healthcare analysis and Salesforce large-scale data systems; and 2) it automates compliance by way of a data product. As it spreads through the ecosystem, it is actually building an infrastructure that can facilitate safer exchanges of data.
• With automation, those who typically had to do the compliance work can now become overseers. Instead of execution, they can be analyzing to ensure the output, or the final process works out to their expectations. Software does have bugs, but it is very good at executing when there’s a well-defined scope. Integral says they have the right team to define that scope and they work with clients and partners to define that scope as well.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.