Securing Sensitive Data

Entrepreneur Art Gross aims to help companies protect sensitive health and personal data.

By Anthony Bucci, Assistant Editor  On Jul 6, 2015

In 2000, entrepreneur Art Gross decided to leave his job at pharmaceutical giant Merck to go into business for himself. Gross founded Entegration, Inc., which specializes in helping clients implement electronic medical record (EMR) systems for their medical practices. 

However, many of Gross’ clients at Entegration began to complain about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – the federal regulation that protects the privacy of patient medical records – due to the challenge of upgrading their software and training employees to comply with the regulation. In 2010, Gross saw the opportunity to capitalize on HIPAA and founded a new company – HIPAA Secure Now! – to help medical practices prevent HIPAA violations with risk analysis, IT security advice and employee training.

Today, Morristown-based HIPAA Secure Now! has approximately 2,000 clients in all 50 states, and is rapidly growing.

“There is a big push from paper-based health records to electronic-based records, and HIPAA provides all of the guidelines around how this data needs to be protected and with whom it can be shared,” Gross says. “Over the past five years, there have been more than 100 million patient medical records breached, so it is important to take the proper steps to protect that data.”

HIPAA Secure Now! delivers its services online via a cloud-based portal, which is why it has clients in every state.

“We have online training for employees with policies and procedures that they can access and videos that describe the policy,” Gross says. “We then log in and scan a client’s network to find all of the sensitive data and tell them what they have to do to comply with HIPAA to protect the data.”

In 2014, Gross took the formula he used to create HIPAA Secure Now! and founded a third company – Breach Secure Now!, which serves small- to mid-sized businesses in non-health related industries.

“We had partners come to us asking if we could provide a similar service to their clients in manufacturing, financial and retail industries, in order to protect data like credit card information and sensitive e-mail,” Gross says. “Most people don’t realize it, but 71 percent of data breaches happen to smaller companies; we just don’t hear about it often.”

Gross says that even though HIPAA Secure Now! “has been growing 100 percent year over year,” and has goals to grow four times that amount each year, he sees Breach Secure Now! as the bigger opportunity, because the market is much larger.

“We are putting a lot of resources into making our services as good as they can be,” Gross concludes. “We are constantly refining them, and I have very big goals for both. The demand for what we do is picking up, and we will be here to exceed that demand in every way possible.”

 

Related Articles: