Capsicum Went to Rio by Way of a Telehealth App

If you’re like us, your free time these past few weeks has been spent watching the 2016 Olympics. We never fail to be incredibly impressed by the precision, speed, strength, agility and overall prowess on display by the world’s top athletes. But as we became acutely aware after working with one recent client, the Olympics aren’t just about great athletics. Great medicine, too, plays a significant role in the Olympics, an event that continues to drive medical innovation. Just as skilled athletics require innovative medicine, skilled medicine needs innovative technology–a lesson we learned from our client SirenMD.

SirenMD is a workplace collaboration platform, helmed by physicians, that recently developed an app with the help of Capsicum. SirenMD’s CEO Dr. Lee Kaplan is currently on staff at the Olympics, and in fact helped French gymnast Samir Ait Said off the mat and into the hospital after Said broke his leg during a vault landing. Dr. Kaplan and other physicians and trainers not only use SirenMD at the Olympics, but also with major league and college football, baseball and hockey teams. Teaching hospitals and large physician practices are using the app, as well.

SirenMD’s app is a telehealth communication platform that allows caregivers to connect easily and comprehensively, in real time. SirenMD lives at the intersection of healthcare technology, and the app allows physicians and other medical caregivers to communicate seamlessly through mobile devices.  Users can exchange and request diagnoses, questions, paperwork and urgent notifications. Colleagues are able to collaborate more comprehensively than before, all within PHI and HIPAA-compliant software.

Compliance is partly why SirenMD came to Capsicum Group to develop and secure the SirenMD app. Thanks to our data recovery and cybersecurity experts who work with the healthcare community (by far not the only industry Capsicum works with, but one in which we have extensive experience), we were SirenMD’s first pick for assisting in the development of this communication platform. SirenMD enlisted us to create an ironclad technological architecture to protect patients and healthcare professionals. There was no question that the app had to be PHI and HIPAA-compliant in order to follow national standards for electronic healthcare transactions, as protecting sensitive patient information is as important as ever in a world where cloud and mobile communication can potentially be exploited by malicious parties.

As part of our custom, ongoing security plan for SirenMD, we conduct regular code reviews, intrusion response and penetration testing on the software. Code review (which we wrote a blog about earlier this year), entails deploying a combination of automated tools and methods to find and repair vulnerabilities and other code errors. During intrusion response we conduct mock test scenarios in which attempted compromises are battled and removed. We also conduct penetration testing, during which our team of skilled, ethical hackers investigates possible avenues of exploitation, in preparation for the possibility that a malicious party would want to access and steal sensitive medical information.

Overall, our work with SirenMD was an encapsulation of the security and compliance services we offer at Capsicum. Our team of technology experts finds the code errors and other vulnerabilities that in-house teams often overlook, and also handles incident response, regulatory compliance review and technology infrastructure enhancement. As we did for SirenMD, we can also perform a thorough security evaluation, complete with a customized assessment, report and action plan.

About Capsicum Group, LLC
Capsicum Group, LLC is a Philadelphia-based consulting company and Relativity hosting partner that assists law firms and in-house counsel as well as companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare, financial, retail and educational fields succeed in legal, regulatory, and technology projects. Since 2000, they have helped clients with digital forensics, cybersecurity, e-discovery, data recovery, restoration, and compliance cases. As a leading electronic discovery and forensic investigation firm based in Philadelphia, Capsicum is able to tackle complex tech and legal projects worldwide. In addition to their Philadelphia headquarters, Capsicum has offices in New York and Florida. For details on cybersecurity, digital forensics, technology consulting and e-discovery services available from Capsicum Group, visit the Capsicum Group website at http://www.capsicumgroup.com or call 888-220-3101.