Chris Grant From Group Health Cooperative Is In theCUBE During Splunk.conf 2014

To protect patient’s personal medical information, the Group Health Cooperative built a privacy monitoring application on top of Splunk Inc. Chris Grant, CISO of Enterprise Security, Enterprise Risk and Governance at the Group Health Cooperative, said that this application “offers a better way to see potential privacy issues and track access to records,” so that the company can ensure all viewers of patient information have “value business reasons for access.”

Privacy is one of the most essential issues in the healthcare industry, a sector of the economy that has faced challenges when it comes to harnessing new technologies, Grant commented. Regulations like HIPPA present serious hurdles to Big Data adoption in the enterprise, but Grant believes that Splunk provides a “framework” that “gets [companies] above the fray of basic IT development and implementation,” making it easier for healthcare companies to adopt new tools in a rigid regulatory landscape.

In the healthcare industry, he observed, “peoples’ hearts are in the right place,” but getting everyone to adopt Big Data “is a matter of getting people’s minds in the right place.” Now that the technology is available, agile healthcare companies are reaching for data-driven outcomes and looking for ways Big Data can inform their business processes and services.

Photo by SiliconANGLE