When Box launched in 2005, they embodied an ambitious, no-frills idea: cloud-based file storage for consumers.
In 2007, the company began selling their cloud-based storage services to businesses. They’ve grown at an incredible pace since, servicing over 225,000 businesses worldwide. With an estimated 25 million enterprise users on Box, the next logical step was to zero in on various vertical industries.
Much to the surprise of business analysts, Box ventured into the healthcare and life sciences realm first, before even financial services. The announcement came during last year’s Health 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, where Box CEO Aaron Levie announced details of the company’s healthcare plan, including a partnership with CareCloud.
The two companies unveiled an integration of Box’s content-sharing and collaborative capabilities with CareCloud’s platform at last week’s HIMSS Conference in Orlando, but many questions lingered beyond the demonstration.
Thankfully, Missy Krasner, Managing Director for Healthcare and Life Sciences at Box, is here to answer them.
Why is Box penetrating healthcare? How are healthcare organizations using Box?
Healthcare and life sciences is the vertical we’re focused on most because we’ve already seen a lot of traction there, organically. Hospitals using Box will be able to collaborate with teams internally, sharing all kinds of different files, documents, videos and images between teams and external parties such as research partners and other vendors and organizations. This allows for collaboration by letting users edit, alter and assign tasks.
We began with hospitals, and when we became HIPAA-compliant about a year and a half ago, it accelerated our relevance in the industry. We now sell to hospitals, integrated delivery networks, medical groups, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies
What did Box and CareCloud announce at HIMSS? What does it mean for providers and patients? What can both companies do today that they couldn’t do before?
At HIMSS, we announced details of the integration between Box and CareCloud — specifically CareCloud Community, CareCloud’s patient portal and collection of patient engagement tools. We’re allowing users to extract a patient’s clinical summary. You can pop the summary into a Box account and into a discreet Box folder titled “CareCloud Medical Summary.” Users will open it to receive the entire summary.
This all happens on the back end, and once you actually link the accounts, updates to your clinical summary in CareCloud will also update automatically within Box.
Why is this important? When patients visit multiple doctors’ offices in the community practice model, the burden is on the patient to attend all of these different practices. The patient must then log onto the patient portals attached to these practices’ EHRs and extract personal data, either in the form of a CCD or a CDA. But where does the patient put it? If the goal of a patient is to try and aggregate all data to have a longitudinal health record that is shareable with other doctors, then there’s an advantage behind taking your data from CareCloud and storing it in Box.
Many providers and patients are still nervous about storing information in the cloud. How does Box address those concerns?
With cloud-based applications, you get cheaper implementation. You’re not dealing with software you have to download. You’re avoiding costly upgrades. Overall, you get much better scalability. So if your data is growing over time, you don’t have to worry about finding room in onsite servers.
We see it as an ‘economies of scale’ issue. The cloud is a much easier solution. A lot of folks still want their data on-premise, but I think one of the ways in which we’re seeing ambulatory solutions migrate to the cloud is through EHRs. So many physician practices have a hard time with costly on-premise implementations, and for whatever reason, these practices’ EHRs may get acquired as the marketplace keeps consolidating. Where does their data go? The advantage of being on a web-based or cloud-based EHR makes it so easy. The change in healthcare trends is about a data migration strategy at this point.
What’s next for the Box-CareCloud relationship? How else can the two companies collaborate to benefit providers in the future?
There are three main points as to why we’re excited to work with a company like CareCloud. The first is that we’re both cloud-based, so the cloud is in our DNA. Second, we both expose our APIs, so we have web services. It’s extremely nimble and quick for us to work together because it’s so easy to integrate. And last but not least, we both have our eye on the platform piece.
Over here at Box, we have something called One Cloud. This is our platform. We expose APIs and we have a bunch of widgets we can embed in other people’s portals. We have 1000 apps in our platform.
CareCloud is thinking similarly. Its product has a social underpinning and it can grow and scale. Soon, CareCloud will grow at the platform level, too. So we feel the ideology and the DNA of the two companies really align.
Where do we go from there? The sky is really the limit. The first stage was for us to build a connection with Community. I think the second stage is to figure out where some of Box’s document storage and unstructured document transfer can help natively inside the EHR and or the revenue cycle management system.
Last but not least, a lot of doctors are saying they’d love a data backup or data migration strategy. So doctors are on this one EHR, but then want to transfer to CareCloud. What’s a really simple way of backing up data from one system and being able to extract it and put it in another system? Box may be a very interesting answer for that kind of workflow issue.
You’ve been in the healthcare industry for a long time. What macro trends do you think will help proliferate cloud-based services a la Box and CareCloud?
That’s a great question. I think cost and scalability are the biggest goals for any cloud service. These are the two major trends.
As you start moving into a landscape focused on population health, cohort analyses, and predictive analyses around which patients can get interventions faster, handling and managing data becomes essential. It’s about collecting data, funneling it from different databases, running the appropriate analyses on it and generating clinical insights that are immediately usable. And because its a data-driven proposition, you need IT tools that can accommodate real-time data uploads, data queries and clinical insights. I think its only natural that we’re moving almost all of these business processes to the cloud.
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