Alexis
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Data Dave Dives Deeper. I’m Alexis, your host of this podcast, and today I am here with, well, don’t you know it, Data Dave. Hey, Dave, how are you today?
Data Dave
I’m very well, Alexis. How are you?
Alexis
I am good. I’m excited. We have a guest today to dive deeper with. Before we introduce our guests, though, I want to remind our listeners, if you have a question for Data Dave, you can always reach out to us at Dave at talktech@d3clarity.com or right on the D3Clarity website, or by connecting with Dave or myself on LinkedIn. We love to answer listener questions on Talk Tech, and we would love to have more guests on Data Dave Dives Deeper. So always reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you, but like I said, we have a guest. So, Dave, do you want to introduce our guest today?
Data Dave
We are joined today by Ed Gaudet, who is the CEO and founder of Censinet. Welcome, Ed. We’re really happy that you’re with us and excited to have this conversation.
So, to kick this off, why don’t you say a little bit about yourself? What got you here? What was your journey to get here? We find that a lot of people have some very interesting journeys as to what brought them to this point, because being on this podcast is clearly a destination to this point. And a little bit about Censinet?
Ed Gaudet
Yeah.
Data Dave
Welcome and thank you for coming.
Ed Gaudet
And thanks for having me, Alexis. Dave, thanks for hosting this podcast. I’m Ed Gaudet, CEO, founder of Censinet, and yeah, I’ve had quite a journey. Mine was a bit of a rambunctious child throughout school. You know, I guess you’d say I was patient zero for ADHD.
So, you know, one of those report cards that says, “Doesn’t sit still, doesn’t listen, you know, doesn’t follow directions, et cetera.”
Ended up going to a business school for writing, of all things. So, I was a, quote unquote, technical writer. Yeah. But I did that and went to college for writing because that’s what I could do with very little ease, and became a technical writer. And my first job out of school was a startup writing manuals. And I still have that manual somewhere on my shelf, which is filled with books here. And from there, I quickly realized. In a startup, you get to do a lot of things – wear a lot of hats – get exposure to a lot of different jobs and roles, and quickly, you know, within the course of a year or so, I was running all of marketing for this small startup.
I’m an autodidact, so, I was reading about it. Even though I should have taken courses at the school I was at, I didn’t. I took things like film, theory of film. And so anyway, long story short is, I’ve been in startups all my career. 11 startups. This is my 11th company. Wow. I’ve been.
Alexis
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you go on.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah.
Alexis
“This is my 11th company.” As in it’s the 11th company that you’ve been with or it’s your 11th startup. It’s the 11th one you’ve started.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah. So I’ve been with. And some of them, I was early-stage founder, and some of them I was early-stage but not the founder.
Alexis
Got you. Okay. I was like, I need to clarify this because… man.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s a good point.
Alexis
Okay.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Many people say that. And I go, no, no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t the founder in all those. That would be insane. Although being at a startup, I will tell you, if you are early, regardless of whether you’re the founder or not, it’s a pretty risky ordeal and proposition.
And so two companies went public, which again, I was part of the process. I wrote the S1, drafted the S1s for those opportunities, which was fun. Yeah. I’m a writer, so I thought, “Hey, I can help out writing S1s.” And that’s a fascinating experience going through that process. I will tell you,
Data Dave
Going through an S1 process is fascinating. It is really interesting. A fun time.
Ed Gaudet
It’s so fascinating.
Data Dave
My S1 experience was similar. We spent months and months drafting the S1. And we spent months and months then fixing the company to match the S1.
Ed Gaudet
That’s right.
Data Dave
Which is when we decided it was all a bad idea. So we sold it to IBM.
Ed Gaudet
That’s a better process, by the way.
That’s a better process. Yeah.
Alexis
I like that.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah. Going public nowadays, I mean. So, the first one was in ‘95. The second one was in, I think ‘14, 2014. And what was interesting about the ‘14 one was, that was my first company into – even though it wasn’t a startup when I joined – I was brought on board to really bring them into healthcare from a market marketing product perspective.
And so, I wrote the market entry thesis. We went all in on healthcare. So, we were a horizontal company. We sold to everything from the Vatican to Ferragamo, believe it or not. Those were two customers.
Alexis
Wow.
Ed Gaudet
Of the product. Yeah. It was a single sign-on product in going all-in healthcare at the time, which was very risky. Obviously, that means you’re giving up the revenue that you have currently, but it was the right decision and drove growth of the organization. And it was my first time in healthcare, and I really loved working in healthcare, which is why when I started Censinet, which is a third party and enterprise risk management platform for healthcare, exclusively for healthcare, what I learned is that you don’t really understand healthcare unless you’re in it.
Everyone thinks they know healthcare because we’re all patients. We know people that have been patients, we have family members that are patients. But from the outside looking in, healthcare looks like every other industry. And it’s not, it’s like no other industry. And the excitement for me was really experiencing all the goodness that working in healthcare provides that you would not know from the outside looking in.
Data Dave
What’s interesting with healthcare, as well that I found, is that healthcare changes around the world.
Ed Gaudet
That’s right.
Data Dave
The business of healthcare is very, very different as you move around the world.
Ed Gaudet
That’s right. The business, the regulations.
Data Dave
Right.
Ed Gaudet
The maturity of the technology. And one of the reasons why previously I hadn’t looked at healthcare is because they were always five years behind in terms of technology adoption until 2009, 2010 when you had the High Tech Act, the era which the Obama administration put out, which basically was a lot of money on the guidelines available for investments and which became a forklift upgrade to the infrastructure. And they went from, you know, being five years behind to being a parody with every other industry from an infrastructure perspective. And that’s what really made it interesting. They, you know, took all those paper-based processes and brought them to electronic systems. So, that was sort of what drove the business and drove the opportunity to take the company public and then drove the opportunity to start this.
Data Dave
My foray into healthcare was started in 2005 with a company called Initiate. And what we were doing was patient records, understanding patient records, and we did patient matching to ensure those. If you know healthcare, then it was the EMPI, the Enterprise Master Patient Index.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah, yeah.
Data Dave
Understanding exactly who this patient is and how many visits have they had and how many encounters have they had and various other things to say this person is this person, is this person. And we did that across the US.
Ed Gaudet
Managed fraud. A lot of people will sort of draft behind other people’s identity so that they can get care and they’re, you know, they’re not being covered and obviously that’s costly to the industry.
Data Dave
And with that cascading that into the clinical because in most industries, if you get the wrong person, not good things happen. In healthcare, if you get the wrong person, catastrophically bad things happen.
Ed Gaudet
I know, people lose arms and legs. Right? I mean, you hear about the cases where they went in for appendicitis and they came out without a limb. I mean, that’s right. What happened, like? But it does happen. It’s incredible the risk involved.
Alexis
I think I told the story on the podcast before when we were talking about governance and matching. But I’ll tell you this story. I went into the doctor’s office and I gave him my name, my full name. Okay, good. And I gave him my birthday. Okay, good. They asked me for my emergency contact. I gave it, who was my mom at the time. Okay, good. And I go into the doctor’s office, and they start asking me these other questions. And they’ve got my file in front of them. And, what I’m answering doesn’t really align with what they’re saying to me. And I’m like, I mean, you verified my name, my birthday, my mother’s full name. Like… and we found that there was another Alexis Keller whose mother had the same name as mine, who had the same birthday as me. I mean, day, month, year. And I knew of her because the story went around of my birth, where there was another woman who had the same name as my mom, who gave birth to another Alexis Keller in the same hospital as me on the same day as me.
Ed Gaudet
That’s like Inseption.
Alexis
And we cross at this doctor’s office. And I was just like, “Delete everything. You just changed in her record. Put it back.”
Ed Gaudet
No, no,
Alexis
“That’s her, not me. I’m a different person. Please stop.”
Ed Gaudet
But, like, that’s crazy.
Alexis
If they would have left it. And all of a sudden, now my information is in there. We have different blood types maybe, or whatever that could be.
Ed Gaudet
That could have been huge issues. Allergies, right?
Data Dave
I mean, yeah, really bad things happen. It’s really bad.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah.
Data Dave
So we develop things like identifying different twins. Because when you’ve got twins that have the same parents and they don’t have names yet, and you don’t have anything, but you’ve got to create a medical record for the individuals as twins. They don’t have a Social Security number at this point. Like I said, they don’t even have names. It’s twin A and twin B. Yeah.
Ed Gaudet
Maybe Baby Wilkinson 1. Baby Wilkinson 2.
Data Dave
That’s right.
Alexis
Yeah.
Data Dave
So what led you to Censinet? What does Censinet do? And why the problem around third party risk?
Ed Gaudet
I was actually briefly retired, and I was acting 18, and I was starting to follow these guys around – the Grateful Dead. And my wife had other plans for me, which included going back to work. So I was thinking about, you know, problems, you know, at Improvada, which was the company I referred to earlier, they were selling into healthcare. And as part of that process, you had to complete a security risk assessment. And because I ran products, my team had to marshal these through the system. And you saw one, you saw one. They were all different, different formats, different questions, different. It was impossible to get any, quote unquote, leverage.
And so that became an obvious problem that I began to look into. I reached out to a dozen or so providers, health systems that I’d worked with, and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about solving this problem. What’s it look like on your end?” And it was equally as big and actually bigger.
And so that kind of led me to build out the platform, which is, we took a two-sided network approach to it, which is very unique in the industry.
Purpose built for healthcare, meaning that we codified and automated all the workflows specific to healthcare that would drive the best outcomes around efficiency and effectiveness and economics of the overall solution. So, we look at not only the going faster, but we also look at going cheaper and doing it in a way that drives much more leverage and scale out of the system that you would get otherwise.
So, we have one customer, 22 people full-time, doing the job, took it down to 6, and they increased their throughput 3x/4x. So, it’s those types of outcomes that we deliver as part of our overall solution.
Alexis
Ed, I’m going to need you to take that down and give me a… if you were explaining this to a, I don’t know, HR person who doesn’t work in the healthcare industry, how would you explain what your company does?
Ed Gaudet
Yeah, okay. So, just about every process in healthcare, everything that one needs to do in healthcare to deliver care, is backed by or supported by some type of electronic system, a piece of software, a piece of hardware. And that wasn’t the case two decades ago. So ,this is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Just like in finance, where everyone’s familiar with losing a credit card or getting their identity stolen. The bank kind of makes you whole. But if you lose your data, your protected health information in a hospital, the genie is sort of out of the bottle, and it can be embarrassing depending on what you’re dealing with. And it’s hard to get it back in and made whole again. So, the data theft is obviously a problem. But what’s even more of an issue, and this thing that came up in a couple years prior to Censinet starting out, is this thing called ransomware. And what ransomware did was it disrupted the ability to deliver care.
So, losing data is one thing, but if you can’t deliver care, the hospital shuts down. Now you have a problem because you got people in the hospital that need help. You have elective surgeries that are coming in, you have people that might be on their way in via an ambulance and now have to be diverted to the next closest hospital.
If you’re in a rural community that could be two and a half hours away, if you’re having a heart attack, you’re not going to make it, right? So, it becomes a life-or-death situation now, whereas before it was more of an inconvenience.
So that process is what we help solve for. We help to reduce the risks associated with events and incidents like ransomware, data breaches, and data loss. And we do that by helping our customers understand not only their enterprise-level risk, those things that they control, but their third-party or supply chain risk, those things that they use but are outside of their control.
Alexis
Got you.
Ed Gaudet
So they can put in corrective actions, remediations like controls themselves, or they can force or require the third party to put those controls in place from a security perspective.
Alexis
Got it. Okay. But it’s tailor-made for healthcare.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah. And so, in order to understand the security profile and the risks associated with a third party, you go through a process of collecting data. And so ,what we do is we facilitate that to give you leverage. We do it not only to give you leverage within your own enterprise, within your own health system, but we also leverage the community network too, because we’re a network.
When one provider assesses one vendor, that vendor now becomes available for all the other people on the network at the click of a button.
Data Dave
So you collect all the HIPAA assessments and various other things, all that client within HIPAA constructs, and then cross-pollinate those to a certain extent between suppliers and providers, up and down the supply chain healthcare, so that you simplify the whole HIPAA compliance BA type process.
Ed Gaudet
You got it. And that’s how we started, and we expanded to go up, if you will, the market to what’s called governance, risk, and compliance GRC and over into cybersecurity, general cybersecurity. So, we include a lot of those elements now to the platform. So, for example, we have a whole benchmarking solution as you’re entering in data about your enterprise. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to see what you look like compared to your peers? We do all of that, which healthcare loves. How am I doing? How’s my coverage? How’s my maturity? Oh, how are my investments? Am I spending enough or not spending enough? Am I set up for success with resources? Do I have the right ownership of those resources? Or should I, you know, go fight for ownership of BioMed? Because BioMed runs all the medical devices, and we could do a much better job if we consolidate that under one platform and under one view of risk.
Alexis
Super security-driven, super focused on healthcare. Okay, yeah, that was a good explanation. I followed that completely. That’s what I needed.
Ed Gaudet
Thank you. Thank you. So, what’s interesting about this opportunity, if I may just one last point. One of the core differences in healthcare is that shared mission that you have with your customer that’s unlike any other industry, and the relationships you build because of that.
And also the personal mission that this becomes. Because everyone has either been a patient or if your mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend is hooked up to a device and it gets hit or is on their way in the ambulance and it’s under attack, now it becomes personal.
Alexis
Yeah.
Ed Gaudet
Right. So it’s a, it’s a nice tie-in to a personal mission where we want to keep everyone safe. Patient risk is cyber risk. Cyber risk is patient risk. Right? So, we want to make sure that people are safe, patients safe and, data is safe obviously, and, and the operations are safe and continuous.
Data Dave
So, where do you see the path of data and healthcare going?
That’s an easy, that’s a nice open-ended question.
Ed Gaudet
That’s an easy question.
Data Dave
Nice open-ended question for you.
Ed Gaudet
Well, there’s so much pressure on data. There’s the pressure to open up data.
Right? So there’s interoperability rules that say that you have to share data, or you can be fined, you can be held to some type of corrective action by the OCR, or some other, you know, other agency within the Office of Civil Rights is the one that enforces the HIPAA law and enforces the interoperability rule. But there’s also the pressure to keep it safe. So, you have these two competing…
Data Dave
The pressure to keep it not just safe, but from a business side, constrained. Only certain data can be used for certain things.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah, that’s right, yep. Constrained, safe, open, and portable.
Data Dave
Right.
Ed Gaudet
I mean the P in HIPAA is portability. Right? And so that rule was developed in a way to actually enhance the portability of data, but keep it secure at the same time. So, there’s this constant tension between both of those requirements, which makes it really interesting and yet difficult and complex. If you’re in technology, how do you solve for both while delivering some type of experience that makes the clinical outcomes better, the patient experience better? Cybersecurity better?
Data Dave
Because some of these rules are directly in conflict with each other. Right? Because sometimes it’s kind of, “I could get a better clinical outcome if I was allowed to use that data, but I’m not. And I understand why, but I’m not allowed to.”
Ed Gaudet
That’s right. That’s right, exactly.
Data Dave
Let me ask another one. Who do you think owns healthcare data? And follow on from that. Who do you think should own healthcare data?
Alexis
Throwing him softballs today.
Data Dave
I’m just going out there, right?
Ed Gaudet
Well, if it’s data about me, I own it, I should own it. And the system should be a steward. I should own it, right? This, the system should be a steward of the data on behalf of me as a patient.
And that’s how I think it should work. But then that opens up things, too, because if you think about the interoperability rule, okay, great. I’ve made that available to an application on a phone, right? I’m holding up my phone, you can’t see it. And then I, as a patient, take that and then do something stupid with it. I should be liable. That’s what the law says. But then how do you prove that it was me that leaked the data versus my health system?
Data Dave
That becomes an interesting conundrum.
Ed Gaudet
Right? So data sovereignty, if you will, is an interesting problem to solve for.
Data Dave
It really is an interesting problem. And it’s kind of because it’s the individual. The individual doesn’t even know the complexity of the data that describes them.
Ed Gaudet
Right.
Data Dave
How can they steward their own data?
Ed Gaudet
Right. They don’t have the tools. Yeah, they can consume it, but do they have the right set of tools to… Actually, I’m just taking a note here because I like what we’re talking about. I’m actually might do an article on it.
So I’m a contributor, I’m a writer for the Forbes Tech Council. So, I’m always looking for interesting ideas. Data sovereignty is an interesting one.
So yeah, no, it’s a really hard problem to solve because it is very fluid, it is very liquid. And yet at the same time you got those two pressures, right? Open it up, make it portable, protect it, make it secure.
Data Dave
And the individual is conflicted as well because as we look around it, outside of healthcare, we’re all looking for the benefit. We want somebody to tell us what color of dress to buy. Sorry, I’m picking on you, Alexis, because you’re wearing a red dress. So, we know that Alexis likes the color red. So, we probably should market red things to her, and that will make it easy for Alexis.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah. There’s a consumer.
Data Dave
But should we be offering that level of benefit when it comes to healthcare data? That can be very significant.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah. There’s a temporal aspect of the open it up and secure it problem and that the state that one is in will drive what side of the spectrum you’re on. Right? So, for example, if God forbid, you know, my child needs a life-saving operation or drug or something, I’m going to give the data. I’m given the data. I’ll take the risk. Give me the paper, and I’ll sign it. Versus if everything is going well in my life, and I don’t want any hassles, I want it secure, protect it, don’t lose my data. Right? So, there’s that weird, you know, dynamic where the patient or the patient’s loved one is in the process of going through, as well, that also informs, I think where people are on that question.
Data Dave
It goes another level which is say, you’re in a car crash – as classic example. You’re being rushed to the hospital. Wouldn’t it be nice if that hospital knew exactly who you were?
Alexis
Yeah.
Data Dave
By the time you arrived?
Ed Gaudet
No question.
Data Dave
That would be fabulous from a patient care perspective. But now I’m releasing law enforcement data to healthcare.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah.
Data Dave
To solve that problem. I’ve got to know that this accident occurred. I’ve got to know who the first responder was. I’ve got to know what happened. I’ve got to know the VIN number of the car because it’s probably the owner of the car that’s in it. Even though they’re not conscious, they may or may not have scanned the driver’s license. But this isn’t healthcare data, this is now law enforcement data.
Ed Gaudet
Yeah. And maybe their medical bracelet fell off during the crash, and I’m going to administer a drug that’s going to actually kill them or put them into a coma.
Data Dave
Exactly. So, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly who is in the ambulance, exactly who is going to show up at the hospital, but should they, given that this is law enforcement data?
Ed Gaudet
Well, it’s an interesting question, but I’m actually looking forward to when we make that leap. Next step, the function in our relationship with technology. Right? We’re sort of in one right now with AI, the next obvious move is where we start to plant in the AI chip into our heads.
At that point. That’s where I want to, like, enable. Okay. I don’t need the bracelet, anything. Everything else is in this chip here. Just scan the chipboard, scan something, or do. Or do the readout of the chip or something. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m getting all the benefits of AI, but I’m also, like, now I don’t have to worry about the scenario you just painted, Dave.
Alexis
What you just described, though, Dave, like a lot of us are doing to some extent. If I’m in a trash and you pick up my phone and you hit the SOS button, you’re gonna see everything that I’m allergic to. You’re gonna see the name of my emergency contact, like, and I carry that with me everywhere. And I’ve put that out there knowing that it can probably be taken advantage of. But just like you said, Ed, like, I don’t want them giving me medication that I know is gonna kill me. If somebody can pick up my phone and stop them from doing that and give me the type of blood that I need, like, I’m gonna take that risk.
Ed Gaudet
Exactly. All day long, right?
Data Dave
Exactly. But it’s an interesting question. It’s interesting. As society moves ever more electronic, ever more data being collected and driven and access to where do we stop? Where do we go? Where is the line?
Ed Gaudet
Well, our default setting is to protect and constrain and because, you know, the flip side of that is, it’s people.
And whenever there’s people involved, right, you got good and you got bad. Righ?. And so, if you get too open, you got the government now and you got other people that are nefarious. And so where do you draw the line between giving away too much and, you know, constraining too much?
Alexis
I feel like we often end these conversations with, “If these were easy questions to answer, they’d already have answers.” But I love them, really have enjoyed just kind of the thought and the conversation behind this. But we are going to wrap up the podcast. Before we go, Ed, I see in your background, hopefully anyone watching has seen it too, you have your own podcast. Do you want to give it a shameless plug before we go?
Ed Gaudet
Yeah, it’s great. Thank you for that. Yeah. So when I started the company, I wrote a manifesto. I’ve always wanted to write a manifesto. Well, it’s actually, I wrote one before, but I wanted to do another manifesto. So, I wrote one about third party risk. And in there, I wrote about the personification of risk. And in healthcare, it’s interesting because unlike other industries, it never goes to bed, right? It’s always active. 24/7 hospitals are always active. There 365 days of the year. So, this notion of risk never sleeps became an interesting phrase, and I kind of borrowed it from the “Rust Never Sleeps” Neil Young album with Crazy Horse back in the 70s. One of my favorite albums.
So, I really liked it. And I started this podcast because I felt like there was a void. There was sort of this gap in the market where people were doing podcasts, but they were all technical, fairly technical. And I really, I love to learn about the people’s journey, like you said. And it just didn’t feel like there was an opportunity for people to sort of be people and just be their authentic self. And so that’s what it’s about. It’s really, I mean, we talk a little bit about technology and things, but mostly it’s about like, “If you could go back in time and ask your 20-year-old self a question, what would… or tell your 20-year-old self something, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self? You’re on a desert, desert island, what five records would you bring? Right? Like, what’s the riskiest thing you’ve ever done?”
So, it’s about the person, and I said I would do it as long as there was interest. And there just keeps being interest. So, I just keep doing it. Thank you for that. Appreciate that.
Alexis
And then any major podcast platform? Where can people find it?
Ed Gaudet
Oh yeah, yeah, it’s on all the major podcast platforms. We also do YouTube, we do video, as well. So, all the videos are up on YouTube as well. Yeah.
Alexis
Okay, well, we’ll make sure to put a link to your pod in our comments on LinkedIn. Go check it out. Wherever you’re listening, you can definitely link over and check out Ed’s podcast as well.
Ed, this has been an awesome conversation. Dave, thank you as well for being here with me today. This has been great.
Ed Gaudet
Thank you very much.
Data Dave
Thank you, Ed. Thank you, Alexis.
