By Erin Register
Roughly 500 cybersecurity companies, comprising 5% of the current global cybersecurity solutions market, were founded in Israel. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) knows how to identify and develop cybersecurity talent. Therefore, the venture capital firms have created an assembly line to facilitate cyber-entrepreneurs. Medigate is a beneficiary of this system.
“After nearly two decades of leading a team of technical analysts focused on the research of cyber-related domains in the IDF, I was eager to apply my cybersecurity expertise to something in the private sector,” Medigate CEO and Co-founder Jonathan Langer said. “I wanted to start a company that would solve a challenging problem for society. That’s when WannaCry hit. After seeing it shut down the operations of many hospitals around the world, I knew that this was a problem that my colleagues and I could solve. So we forged a partnership with a major Israeli health system to figure out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again in the future. In short, we incubated inside that health system, developed some valuable knowledge, successfully raised our seed capital and set our sights on selling our solution in the U.S. market. We were fortunate to have been able to partner with several healthcare systems early on, which validated our solution and problem-solving approach.”
Q: WHAT IS THE MAIN FOCUS OF MEDIGATE?
A: We are a healthcare-dedicated IoT cybersecurity and biomedical analytics company. Rather than developing products aimed at cross-industry audiences and wrestling with the tradeoffs, Medigate’s position has always been about going deep into healthcare. While our beliefs were clearly shaped by the early stage challenges that we faced, our experience has always indicated that a healthcare focus is necessary. Analysts say that nearly 40% of all new IoT devices over the next five years will be healthcare related, so we’re not short on action. While we may not grow as large as our cross-industry competitors, we believe that we can dominate in healthcare and couldn’t imagine it any other way.
Q: WHAT ARE SOME SERVICES MEDIGATE OFFERS?
A: Healthcare cybersecurity is a team sport, and health systems tend to have short benches. Not only are hospitals constrained from an HR perspective, but their environments tend to be highly nuanced, making talent recruitment a special challenge. As Medigate knows healthcare, it integrates and orchestrates data in clinically relevant ways that leverage existing systems spanning IT security, information services, biomed, clinical engineering and even supply chain, procurement and finance. We do not introduce new workflows; we enhance existing ones, integrating long missing data that benefit operations and security practice. It works because we provide a common data foundation. The data not only stimulates non-traditional collaborations, but also stimulates where gaps are identified. It enables a managed service approach to be seamlessly added/integrated. While “tech-enabled” service models are generally hard to support across industry, I think our singular focus is what allows it to work well for us and our clients.
Q: HOW DOES MEDIGATE STAND OUT IN THE MEDICAL EQUIPMENT FIELD?
A: We are distinguished by our data quality and meaningful integrations. I could stop there, but I want to touch on the significance of Medigate’s engineering-heavy company profile and the value of our client partnerships. The healthcare-dedicated skill sets we continue to develop and employ have allowed us to be ultra-responsive to our clients. In terms of product development, those collaborations are shaping our solution in ways that are changing everyone’s view of what’s possible. Based on the quality of endpoint visibility that we provide and the resulting operational improvements that we’re enabling, we’re already viewed as strengthening the ROI mission of the healthcare professionals with whom we work.
Q: DO YOU HAVE ANY SPECIFIC GOALS THAT YOU WANT MEDIGATE TO ACHIEVE IN THE NEAR FUTURE?
A: Ultimately, I would like to see Medigate recognized for having elevated IT cybersecurity practice and helped its leadership achieve more strategic organizational influence. As I mentioned, I know that risk reduction can be monetized, so I know that IT security leadership has an opportunity here. If digital transformation is all about eliminating silos and connecting front, middle and back offices in more powerful, transparent ways, then IT security leadership has the opportunity to repurpose “security data” and orchestrate them to imbue more powerful, cross-functional workflows. If we’re recognized for facilitating that trend, that would make me happy.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, visit www.medigate.io.