International news roundup: Verily ‘eyes’ India, Oxford VR trials in Hong Kong, Israel-Finland collaborate, Blue Cedar-Blackberry partner, NuvoAir inhales $3M

May 2, 2019 | by

Verily rolls along in India with eye health research. Spending its fresh $1bn in funding [TTA 17 Jan], Verily and Alphabet sibling Google are researching machine learning in screening for diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema. The retinal diagnostic program is at Aravind Eye Hospital, a network of eye hospitals headquartered in Tamil Nadu. Early research at Madurai has demonstrated that the algorithm performs on par with general ophthalmologists and retinal specialists assessing the images for disease. The estimated shortage of eye doctors in India is estimated at over 100,000. The stated objective of the research is to detect retinal disease earlier and expand access to screening. Further testing is verifying safety and effectiveness. Verily has received the CE Mark for the algorithm. Verily blog

Oxford VR in pilot to manage mental health in Hong Kong. Oxford VR, AXA Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have partnered for an “immersive therapy” trial using VR. This will focus on managing common mental health issues, such as social avoidance, anxiety and depressive symptoms. The scenarios will be in both English and Cantonese. Details will be announced in June. Mobihealthnews, Oxford VR press release

Israel and Finland are launching a joint collaboration announced last December, led by the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) and the Helsinki Business Hub. The pilot program is starting with a Call for Proposals for joint projects. The two countries will co-develop, test, improve and pilot technologies, products and services in digital health, smart mobility and information and communication technologies. According to Mobihealthnews, the countries both have strong commonalities in public health systems with coordinated data sets, digital health, genomic projects, and advanced interoperability. Also The Jewish Voice

App security innovator Blue Cedar partners with Blackberry. Blue Cedar’s securing data from the app to the provider location will work with BlackBerry Dynamics-enabled mobile apps so that development teams will not be required to manually change source code or add libraries. Both Blue Cedar and Blackberry target international high-security fields such as healthcare, government, and financial. Blue Cedar blog

Swedish respiratory device/app NuvoAir inhales $3M in new funding. NuvoAir targets those managing asthma, COPD, and cystic fibrosis who need to monitor their breathing and lung health in conjunction with their overall health. Last year, the company developed the Air Next system, a portable device that connects via Bluetooth LE to users’ smartphones or tablets. Air Next has a CE Mark. NuvoAir plans to expand into Europe, North America, and Asia. The digital respiratory therapy area is booming, with an estimated 210 million asthma and COPD patients with smartphones worldwide a strong factor. One sign: Propeller Health’s premium acquisition by ResMed.  Mobihealthnews

News roundup: Teladoc acquires MédecinDirect, Blue Cedar closes $17M Series B, Hill-Rom buys Voalte, Withings bolsters sleep tracking

March 20, 2019 | by

Teladoc grows its global reach with the MédecinDirect acquisition. Paris-based MédecinDirect currently has 24/7 telehealth operations within France, with patients able to text, video, or phone GPs or specialist doctors 24/7. Terms were not disclosed and the sale is subject to regulatory approval, but expected to close within the first half of this year. Founded by François Lescure, a pharmacist, and Marc Guillemo, a digital marketer, in 2008, the company’s client base grew to more than 40 leading insurance partners and nearly half of the top 30 private medical insurers (PMIs) in France.  MédecinDirect will become the French unit of Teladoc, which now has operations in the UK, Australia, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, China, Chile and Brazil, covering 130 countries in more than 30 languages with a growing specialist base from earlier acquisitions Best Doctors and Advanced Medical. Teladoc seems to have moved on from its financial and accounting problems that marred 2018, but still is not profitable. Release, Mobihealthnews.

App security innovator Blue Cedar closes on its Series B for $17 million. New investor C5 Capital, a specialist venture capital firm focused on cyber security, joins $10 million (2016) Series A investors Benhamou Global Ventures, Generation Ventures, Grayhawk Capital, and Sway Ventures. Daniel Freeman from C5 Capital will join Blue Cedar’s Board of Directors, Blue Cedar pioneered the approach of securing data from the app to the provider location on a client’s servers or in the cloud, without the smartphone or other mobile device being managed and without additional coding. TTA last year profiled Doncaster UK-based MediBioSense Ltd. using Blue Cedar to protect their VitalPatch app [TTA 23 Jan 18] and later as a case study in how digital partnerships happen and develop [TTA 17 Feb 18]. Release, Blue Cedar blog.

Hill-Rom increases its technology bets with Voalte. Voalte is a mobile communications platform used by hospitals and large healthcare organizations for care teams to securely exchange information and data. The privately held company from Sarasota Florida currently serves 200 healthcare customers, 220,000 caregivers, and more than 84,000 devices. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but is expected to close during Hill-Rom’s fiscal third quarter of 2019. Hill-Rom, primarily known for its ubiquitous hospital beds, late last year teamed with Israeli company Early Sense to create a smart hospital bed that monitors heart and respiration rates [TTA 12 Dec 18], which ties nicely with Voalte’s monitoring. Release.

Tossing the sheets in your bed at home? The newly reconstituted Withings comes to the rescue with deepening its sleep monitoring with an upgraded sleep sensor mat that detects sleep breathing disturbances in frequency and intensity. The connected Withings Sleep app monitors sleep cycles, heart rate and snoring, displaying scores through the companion Health Mate App. Not quite a sleep apnea diagnostic, but significant breathing interruption detected during sleep could indicate the need for further investigation.  Mobihealthnews

Hackermania ‘bigger than government itself’–and 25% of healthcare organizations report mobile breaches

March 7, 2019 | by

To quote reporter Andy Rooney, ‘why is that?’ Everyone in healthcare (with our Readers well ahead of the curve) has known for years that our organizations are special targets, indeed–by hackers (activists or not), spammers, ransomwarers, criminals, bad guys in China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe, plus an assortment of malicious insiders and the simply klutzy. Why? Healthcare organizations, payers, and service companies have a treasure trove of PHI and PII with Big Value. 

So to read in Healthcare IT News that Christopher Wray, the new director of the FBI, is saying that today’s cyberthreats are bigger than any one agency, and in fact bigger than the government itself, it gives you the feeling that the steamroller has not only run over us, but is on the second pass.

According to one reporting company, Bitglass, breach incidents were year-over-year flat (290), but the number of records affected in 2018 nearly tripled from 4.7 million to 11.5 million. Hacking finally became the top cause (45.9 percent) versus unauthorized access and disclosure (35.9 percent). Loss and theft is down to about 15 percent.

And mobile feels like that second pass. Verizon’s Mobile Security Index 2019 reports that 25 percent of healthcare organizations have had a mobile-related compromise. Nearly all hospitals are investing in mobile. In the field, doctors and other clinicians are either using issued devices or BYOD, whether authorized or not. Whether or not their organizations are using app security systems like Blue Cedar [TTA 17 Feb 18] or work with companies like DataArt on securing proprietary systems is entirely another question. Apparently it’s not a priority. According to the Verizon study, nearly half of all organizations sacrificed mobile security in the past year to “get the job done.” Healthcare Dive.

Back to Director Wray, who is urging public-private cooperation especially with the FBI, which itself has not hesitated to break encryption (e.g. Apple’s) in going after criminals’ phones.

It’s Alive! BlackBerry still Sparking with an ‘ultra-secure hyperconnectivity’ healthcare platform

October 10, 2018 | by

And this Editor thought that BlackBerry had long since hung up the ‘Out Of Business Sign’. In this era of BYOD in healthcare and software systems like Blue Cedar that secure apps from these BYODs from the device past the server, the image of the ‘Crackberry’ persists–tiny keyboard, tiny screen, and the corporate governed phone. All these loathsome features have now transitioned to iPhone 6s (tiny keyboard, tiny screen, corporate apps, locked down and trackable everything). (So much for that ‘tech will set you free’ world promised by Steve Jobs in the ‘1984’ spot, replaced by Big Brother–Ed. Donna)

BlackBerry, as a company based in Ontario, Canada, endures as a software platform minus the devices. Much like Nokia, they have taken on the world of IoT in areas demanding tight security. Their latest introduction is the BlackBerry Spark, a software platform they claim will lead the Enterprise of Things (EoT) to “ultra-secure hyperconnectivity from the kernel to the edge”. Hyperconnectivity, in their definition, will enable secure IoT equipment with consumer friendly interfaces, leverage AI and manage smart ‘things’ regardless of operating system and existing platforms, and making military-grade security easy and intuitive for users. Spark will be available to companies (thus EoT) by the end of 2018.

BlackBerry has evidently latched on to a messy need–the lamentable lack of security in most consumer IoT devices. They have also identified the yawning gaps in security in almost every healthcare enterprise in connected devices. In Mobihealthnews, their spokespeople expanded on the technology as they are applying it to healthcare via a quantum-resistant code signing server, a new system using blockchain to deliver medical data and an operating system for secure medical devices. More details on how these are being used so far were cited in their most recent release:

  • A blockchain digital ledger for the Global Commission, an organization focused on diagnostics for children with a rare disease. One of the pilots concentrates on BlackBerry’s powering real-time, actionable analysis to shorten time to diagnosis.  
  • A new OS for medical, QNX OS for Medical 2.0. This is described as a real-time operating system for the development of robotic surgical instruments, patient monitoring systems, infusion pumps, blood analysis systems, and other safety-critical products that must pass stringent regulatory approvals.
  • With the Mackenzie Innovation Institute (Mi2), participating in research around comprehensive security, patient privacy and intelligent connectivity in healthcare IoT.
  • Skin cancer research in Australia with the Melanoma Institute Australia.

Certainly BlackBerry is aiming for a certain sweet spot in healthcare and finding some partners all over the world, though the US seems to be absent. Will they be able to ‘crack’ it and the rest of the world? Time will tell.

How do digital health partnerships happen? Where do you go with them? Views from a developer and an app security provider.

February 17, 2018 | by

This Editor recently covered a partnership between Doncaster UK’s MediBioSense Ltd.and San Francisco-based Blue Cedar, where Blue Cedar’s app security system will protect information from MediBioSense’s app through to the provider database. I was curious how two physically distant small companies, even in this global healthcare business, found each other, as well as how MediBioSense (MBS) adopted a US-developed sensor from VitalConnect. To find out more, I spoke with the company CEOs, Simon Beniston of MBS and John Aisien of Blue Cedar. Their respective experiences led me to three takeaways which are applicable to early-stage companies–wherever they are located.

Past business dealings of the principals and keeping connections ‘warm’ matter a great deal–when the time is right to partner. Both companies had a combination of people and past experience in common. “I had some interaction with Simon during my time at Mocana, the company from which Blue Cedar spun out.” Mr. Aisien noted. “Our sales leadership in the UK continued to be in touch with Simon, and as we continued to execute on our business plan and focused on healthcare, the relationship strengthened. Simon’s role as a healthcare global app developer made him even more attractive as a partner.” For Mr. Beniston considering Blue Cedar as a security partner, it was a combination of contacts and people he knew already, “driven by the realization that while our data was fairly secure by design, I was cognizant of the fact that data protection requirements were growing in the European market with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). As a forward-thinking company, we wanted to get to this early on. Given this, the partnership between MediBioSense and Blue Cedar was a perfect fit.”

MediBioSense’s relationship with VitalConnect is also unusual in that MediBioSense developed their platform that monitors data for the VitalPatch. Mr. Beniston founded the company because he believed that healthcare was where mobile technologies, his prior field, could make a real difference and be joined to the use of biosensors and wearables. His knowledge of the platform and app were thus from the ground up. “We then went on to ensure that their [Blue Cedar’s] technology fit with our technology and the testing was successful. We could then go to healthcare companies and tell them that we have data protection covered. It gives us a competitive edge.”

The right partnerships build use cases, look forward to where their businesses can go in meeting customer needs, and are a step ahead of their clients. Mr. Aisien: “What Simon is doing is a wonderful example of using digital channels to improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs. We think it’s a great proof point of the value of our app-centric approach as it relates to security in healthcare. MediBioSense’s app will be running on devices which are outside of the control of the entity using VitalPatch to capture [the patient’s] data. It’s not practical or economic for that entity to manage the device.”

When asked about whether healthcare users and developers are finally seeing the light about app security, Mr. Aisien acknowledged that it is developing. “The knowledge of the criticality of protecting oneself against security threats is unquestionably there and has been for awhile. With the increased use of digital channels–mobile, IoT, wearables–to improve business and reduce risks, the growth, the understanding, and most importantly, the funding are there. App-centric security continues to evolve because while other approaches like securing the whole device or containerization are technically sound, they are not necessarily economic or practical for all use cases. What makes universal sense is to download the app that already has the requisite levels of security in it.”

This is what attracted Mr. Beniston to use an app-based security approach for MediBioSense. “Historically it’s always been a device approach such as MDM [mobile device management]. One of our key USPs, when we approach our clients, is that one of the big expenses, aside from the VitalPatch, is hardware. One of our strengths is that our platform and interface can work on a consumer mobile device. We can utilize what your clinicians and patients already have in their pockets. They can use what they have, and to date, we haven’t seen any interference with mobile devices.”

He added, “We were surprised that even today, some are saying about GDPR that ‘we’ll wait until it happens’. That’s hiding your heads in the sand! (more…)

MediBioSense and Blue Cedar take a new approach to secure medical wearable data (UK/US)

January 23, 2018 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/VitalPatch_Header_Photo_Tablet.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Doncaster UK-based MediBioSense Ltd. has partnered with San Francisco-based Blue Cedar to protect their VitalPatch app on smartphones and tablets. MediBioSense uses VitalPatch in their MBS HealthStream system marketed in the UK in acute care and long-term care setting. Blue Cedar is securing the app through their patented code-injected technology which protects the VitalPatch-collected data from the app to the provider database. The system with Blue Cedar’s security is available directly from MediBioSense.

VitalPatch is a single-use adhesive biosensor patch applied to the patient’s chest (see left above). It monitors eight vital signs and activity signs: heart rate, respiration, ECG, heart rate variability, temperature, body posture including fall detection/severity, and steps as an indicator of activity. MediBioSense contracted with the US-based developer, VitalConnect, to sell the system in the UK. VitalPatch is US FDA-cleared (Class II) and CE Marked for the EU.

One impetus, according to the release (PDF), is the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the pan-European/UK data-protection law slated to take effect in May. This not only applies to European Union citizens’ personal data but also requires reports on how organizations safeguard that data. 

Blue Cedar, which this Editor has previously profiled [TTA 3 May 17], has developed code-injection technology that secures data from the app to the provider location on their servers or in the cloud. It secures the app without the device being managed. Devices have their own vulnerabilities when it comes to apps even when secured, as 84 percent of cyberattacks happen at the application layer (SAP). Blue Cedar’s security also enables tap-and-go from an icon versus multiple security entries, thus quick downloading from app stores or websites. For companies, the secured app provides granular analytic reports about users, app usage, devices, and operating systems which are useful for GDPR requirements.

Blue Cedar’s latest release of app security is Enforce, to secure existing mobile apps using in-app embedded controls to enforce a broad range of security policies. It is sold on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and is primarily targeted to the value-added reseller (VAR) market. 

All the more reason to use all means to secure devices and apps. When as of last week Allscripts‘ EHR for e-prescribing was hit with a ransomware attack (FierceHealthcare), yet another hospital (Hancock Regional in Indianapolis) paid $5,000 to hackers to get back online (Digital Health), and Protenus/DataBreaches.net tracks a breach a day [TTA 29 Dec 17], cybersecurity has become Job #1 for anyone in the healthcare field. (And Big Healthcare now votes for security. Protenus today announced their $11 million Series B led by Kaiser Permanente Ventures and F-Prime Capital Partners. Release.)

Blue Cedar releases new security for health apps, built into the app

May 3, 2017 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Blue-Cedar-Logo-Asset-1@3x-100.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]For healthcare organizations, device and app developers, one stumbling block for apps has been securing data. The endpoint for security has been to secure and manage the device, which constrains widespread BYOD use and convenient downloading. What if, instead, the apps and the data on them were secured without needing to further secure the device? This is what Blue Cedar, a mobile security developer, has done with what they call a mobile device management (MDM) alternative, with security ‘baked into the app”.

One of their first for the new platform is MedStar Health, the largest healthcare provider in the Maryland and Washington, DC region. Blue Cedar’s MDM enabled them to secure their mobile app for clinicians that contained protected patient information (PHI) yet run securely on personal mobile devices.

Blue Cedar’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Ford, spoke with this Editor and explained that their new platform (V3.14) works through injecting a security code in the mobile app, which enforces policy on encryption and use. Their Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) can now incorporate support for secure apps on unmanaged devices, security and connectivity for VoIP-based apps, and enforcement of granular controls for HTTP-based apps. This and other features of the new platform will permit healthcare app developers to distribute apps through sites like the Apple Store or Google Play and “trust functionality” that allows control of data sharing between apps on the same device.

Blue Cedar spun off last year from IoT security company Mocana, founded in 2002, and now has over 150 customers in multiple verticals. They believe their MDM alternative is ideal for healthcare organizations and health app/wearable developers, recently adding representation in the UK and Europe. Release (PDF)