Guest: Shubh Sinha (LinkedIn)
Company: Integral
Show: TFiR: T3M

When it comes to data in the healthcare industry, there is a point of significant tension: compliance wants to move slowly and meticulously, while data analysis rewards experimentation and fast iteration. Integral wants to make sure compliance can reach parity with the speed at which data analysis occurs.

In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Shubh Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO at Integral, shares his insights on the evolution of healthcare data in terms of compliance and the regulations around them.

Current trends in the market:

• The U.S. policy is shining a bigger spotlight on privacy, specifically patient privacy in healthcare, patient privacy in the financial industry, etc. This emerged in the past 10 to 15 years, but was catalyzed by COVID-19, when digital care was delivered and patient information was being transmitted over the wire.
• For companies, from top 20 pharma all the way down to a small startup, compliance and privacy go hand in hand with data, but there’s always a natural tension. This tension blew up massively by the adoption of cloud technologies where you have the ability and the flexibility to work with data and share data,  however you want and whenever you want.
• Companies have been buying different datasets and connecting them because the technology to collect massive amounts of data is widely available. It was seen as a viable business strategy to accrue these large pools of data and use it for business decision-making.
• For a long time, data collection was done for the sake of itself, with some sort of business value potentially attached to it. Now, a lot of the business value is coming from these large pools of data that are naturally available. Companies are becoming a lot wiser by connecting datasets because they’re already available and it doesn’t cost that much to buy.
• Companies are including more data, thinking they’re going to mask it somehow. However, if there are enough data points about someone and line them up, this secondary analysis leads to privacy invasion. These secondary privacy breaches where information points can add up to people at scale are not as obvious, but possible.
• There is a lot more cross-company and cross-industry collaboration. Some companies are working together to analyze data and engage in joint workflows. A pharma company might work with a tech company, and then they engage together using Integral.
• The status quo has been to work with the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) consultants to tell them if certain data is okay to use. However, that process usually takes 6 weeks.

How Integral helps companies:

• It enables companies to integrate healthcare data in order to get high-quality insights and make high-quality decisions, while maintaining the highest patient privacy. It also gives the flexibility to understand and experiment with different combinations of datasets.
• Its highest priority is to ensure that no naked or raw information gets transmitted over the wire.
• It provides real-time privacy feasibility. No need to sacrifice speed or business value. It can indicate in a matter of minutes if a query is going to reveal too much sensitive information about populations.
• It specializes in the healthcare industry. It is already adopted by top 20 pharma companies, public tech companies, and small startups to make sure their compliance is up to par.
• It is able to power data collaboration between companies at scale, through privacy automation and compliance automation. And so all this to say, when it comes to producing the right data set as quickly as possible in the most privacy-compliant way possible.
• It has the best privacy algorithms by some of the best privacy experts in healthcare — put into a very easily deployable and usable software. Compliance becomes a co-pilot with data analysis.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.