In the healthcare industry, access to critical data can save lives and provide improved outcomes for patients. However, information is often inaccessible to doctors, in large part due to antiquated tools and unclear compliance regulation.
ClearDATA is working to streamline the process for healthcare providers so that they can focus on what matters most — their patients. The company’s platform enables healthcare providers to securely, and compliantly, store their data in the cloud and manage it through machine learning. Whether it’s through beta testing, white paper research or company-wide demo days, its teams are always looking for new ways to make critical data more useful.
FOUNDED: 2009
EMPLOYEES: 180 (120 local)
WHAT THEY DO: ClearDATA’s healthcare-exclusive cloud platform delivers secure and compliant solutions to healthcare organizations across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform.
WHERE THEY DO IT: Austin
OPEN DOOR: To foster collaboration, ClearDATA’s leaders don’t have offices. Instead, they have tables in the center of the workspace.
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS: Every new hire spends three days with each department, and is paired with a mentor who can help them navigate the complexities of healthcare regulations and transition into the company.
Matt Ferrari, CTO
Matt lays out the technology roadmap for ClearDATA, and is responsible for developing a product strategy and overseeing product management and development. His goal is to build automation software for the three major public clouds – AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
BEYOND WORK: Matt does his best thinking outside, whether he’s riding his bike or going for a run.
How are you leveraging automation in the healthcare industry?
ClearDATA’s platform is focused on automation of compliance and security within the public cloud. The majority of that automation is our intellectual property, written using native AWS, Azure and GCP tooling. It also uses open source tooling, including SaltStack, to execute on configuration management of public cloud infrastructure environments. This helps automatically remediate changes that a healthcare customer might make that would put their data out of compliance and at risk for a security incident, a hack or worse.
We're developing a compliance dashboard for all three major public clouds...it empowers [healthcare providers] to focus on their patients and their work."
How is your team using tech to transform healthcare?
We’re developing and iterating on a compliance dashboard for all three major public clouds. This will allow each healthcare organization to see the real-time state of compliance for critical healthcare regulations and automatically remediate any dips. They’ll have access to the public cloud and tools like machine learning without worrying about breaches in compliance when serving protected health information. It empowers healthcare providers to focus on their patients and their work, rather than on compliance issues.
What skills do you look for in job candidates?
Our product team spans the United States. The team follows methodologies around Scrum, Agile, Pragmatic Product Marketing, test-driven development and ITIL Change Management. Each product development team has a daily stand up, and demos to stakeholders on progress every two weeks. We communicate on Slack, Google Hangouts and other collaboration tools.
We know we’ve found the best culture fit when a candidate is interested in learning new technologies, experimenting with the latest cloud services and is highly collaborative, both with customers and team members.
Saundra Monroe, Senior Product Manager
Saundra oversees ClearDATA’s compliance dashboard. She gives healthcare providers visibility into their state of compliance and helps them scale as ClearDATA adds features to the dashboard to meet their needs.
BEYOND WORK: Saundra works with high school and college graduates in a mentoring program to prepare them for the job market. She said the experience keeps her grounded.
As a product manager, you often communicate ClearDATA’s product vision to stakeholders. What is that vision?
Healthcare providers have many tools to do their job, including as electronic medical records, but the tools used to assure that software is compliant are limited and under a lot of scrutiny by regulators. We’re focused on our customers’ security, privacy and compliance so that they can focus on improving patient outcomes and saving lives.
We're focused on our customers' security, privacy and compliance so that [healthcare providers] can focus on improving patient outcomes and saving lives.”
How do you communicate about the product and its capabilities to healthcare clients?
We have beta customers who help us through the development and testing process, then we produce instructional documents and videos along with release notes. We also provide the customer with training and support. For healthcare professionals who are not yet customers, we create white papers and blog posts to inform and educate the industry.
What company tradition means the most to you?
Every six weeks we hold a demo day, during which our product team showcases their hard work to the company. It’s a huge benefit to them and validates their contributions to the company. It also benefits the company, as each team member has the opportunity to provide input on products and ask questions about what we are developing. This tradition allows everyone in the company to be an integral part of every product release.
Darin Brannan, CEO
Darin sets the vision for ClearDATA and ensures leadership and team members execute against it. His responsibilities include raising capital, communicating with the team and delivering predictable performance to ClearDATA’s stakeholders.
BEYOND WORK: Spending time with his family and mentoring startups keeps Darin busy most days. When he does find a sliver of time, he challenges himself to take up a hobby outside of his comfort zone. This year, he’s set his sights on polo.
What’s the biggest challenge your team is tackling?
Our biggest challenge is scaling to the next stage of our development. Maintaining our growth and serving larger customers requires operational transformation efforts to level up systems, tools, processes and talent. In some areas, we even have to slow down temporarily so that we can ultimately go faster.
What project excites you the most at ClearDATA?
We want to help larger enterprise healthcare organizations modernize and protect their healthcare IT environments. This requires more operational transformation across all departments, which results in multiple operational excellence projects. It is exciting to feel the benefits of these micro-projects as they work to transform our business for scale.
We want to be known as...a safe, smart way for healthcare organizations to transition to a public cloud IT delivery model that is ultra-secure and compliant.”
What role do you envision ClearDATA playing in the healthcare industry in the future?
In one year, we want to be known as a thought leader in our market and a safe, smart way for healthcare organizations to transition to a public cloud IT delivery model that is ultra-secure and compliant. This will give healthcare providers greater access to, and use of, data to improve patient outcomes. We plan to continue modernizing and protecting healthcare data, but also reinventing additional healthcare technologies.
