What risks really count for your digital health business?

Business Threat Modeling

What risks really count. Spoiler — its not human weakness and messaging.

Abstract

What risks really count for your digital health business? No question is more important for implementing an effective program of security countermeasures for your business. The management board, IT and security practitioners cannot expect to mitigate risk effectively without knowing the sources and cost of threats to the organization.

A modern digital health business depends on its transaction processing systems in order to provide service to patients and collect revenue. The prevailing security model predicates defense in depth of…

Curiosity, Logic and Personal Relevance

If you are like me, you are intellectually curious and eager to improve in your personal, family and work dimensions. There is a lot of useful information online, from choosing mattresses to strengthening your upper back to learning Arabic. A lot of junk and darkness too which you need to ignore.

The thought-process of developing an idea to product-market fit

As a tech entrepreneur, I am curious about the process of taking an idea from gestation to implementation to wide-spread acceptance. A nephew, who is a very very smart boy and in his third year of chemical engineering recently asked me how how he…

When defense in depth fails — two deadly sins

Defense in depth is a security mantra, usually for very good military security and information security reasons. However — defense in depth may be a very bad idea, if your fundamental assumptions are wrong or you get blinded by security technology.

The sin of wrong assumptions

In the defense space — we can learn from military history that incorrect security assumptions carry a high price tag.

The 1973 Yom Kippur war that resulted in a stunning Israel victory but cost 2,800 Israeli lives, and the recent American war in Iraq, that…

Think like an attacker and save the emotion for later.

To be able to do something before it exists,
sense before it becomes active,
and see before it sprouts.

The Book of Balance and Harmony (Chung-ho chi).
A medieval Taoist book

In early December 2017, the Israeli pharmaceutical generics company Teva announced it would lay off about 1,700 of its employees in Israel, who make up about 25% of all the company’s employees in Israel, out of a total workforce of 6,680 employees. …

Don’t look at drug studies. Look at your own product and patients first.

Introduction

Better designs, site-less trials, all-digital data collection and PCM (patient compliance monitoring) can all save time and money in connected medical device clinical trials. This article will help you choose which strategies will be a good fit to help you validate your connected medical device and its intended use for submission to FDA.

What is the baseline cost? (hint don’t look at the costs of drug studies)

If you want to save, you need to know the price tag. Note that the costs of drug trials, including CRO and regulatory affairs is an order of magnitude higher than for connected medical…

The roles of trust, security and privacy in healthcare. If President Biden had told his psychiatrist he was gay, you can bet that it would be on Instagram and Facebook in 5′. So much for privacy.

pri·va·cy/ˈprīvəsē/

The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.

The state of being free from public attention.

When it comes to healthcare information, there have always been two circles of trust — the trust relationship with your physician and the trust that you place in your healthcare provider/insurance company/government health service.

With social networks like Facebook, a third…

Your mental health in a tech startup.

Post-COVID-19, it’s a time when we are all remote-workers.

Startups looking for new ways to add value to customers. Large pharmas looking for ways to innovate without breaking the system.

It’s harder to compete but a lot easier to innovate today

To quote Bill Gates from 25 years ago. Gates was asked how Microsoft can compete in enterprise software when they only had business-unit capabilities.

Gates was quoted as saying that large enterprises are a collection of many business units, so he was not worried.

The same is true today — whether you are a business unit in Pfizer or a 5-person healthtech startup

Here are 7 tips for innovation in healthcare

1. …

Back in 2011, I thought it would only be a question of time before we have a drive by execution of a politician with an ICD (implanted cardiac device).

There was a flurry of excitement about this sort of remote-control exploit that sort of died out although the vulnerabilities continue to surface.

There was even an episode of CSI New York that used the concept of an EMP to kill a person with an ICD.

In fact, a radio exploit of an ICD or embedded insulin pump might be almost impossible to identify unless the device itself was logging external…