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Welcome to This Week Health. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time. Today , we have an interview in action from the 2024 conferences, the spring conferences, VIVE in LA, HIMSS in Orlando.

Special thanks to our sponsors, Quantum Health, Gordian, Dr. First, CDW, Gozeo Health, Artisite, and Zscaler. You can check them out on our website, thisweekhealth. com. Now, onto our interview

I'm Drex, and we are here at HIMSS 2024 doing a lot of interviews for this week's Health. And right now, I'm joined by Vernon from Hypori, and there's a lot of things I want to ask. Let's start with you. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background.

Vernon O'Donnell President of Field Operations at Hypori.

Running our go to market customer interactions from a marketing perspective. I've been with the company nine months. Still early? Yeah, still early. Still in , my maybe coming a little farther than my honeymoon phase. My background is much more traditional enterprise software success.

So I worked in supply chain before this, before that sports, and before that education. Across a variety of segments. Reason I came back though, is I am a veteran myself. , I served in , the army in about 20 ish, was more than 20 years ago. So while this is a great way for me to full circle my career in software.

With something of my personal interest, which is, a really important vital service to the community and the adjacent space. Yeah,

I mean the mission, right? Yeah, the mission

matters.

Tell me about Hypori, tell me about the mission. Yep. And then I'm going to ask you about the name after that.

Yeah, sure. Tell me about the mission. What do you guys do? How does it work? Yep. And you're here, you're coming out in the healthcare community?

That's right. I'll talk about Hypori first, I'll talk a little bit about healthcare, and then I'll give you the name. Hypori is a cybersecurity company focused on protecting data on the edge device.

Now, predominantly that's mobile, but it also works on laptop and tablet and a variety of others. And the way we go about doing that is really unique. We are actually a virtual device hosted in a secure cloud. And then we just stream encrypted change pixels to that edge device. There's no data in transit, there's no data at rest.

If I lose the device, it doesn't matter. If you lose the device, no risk whatsoever. Right, we can get multi-factor biometric authentification You could give your phone to an actual terrorist and it would not matter. It's fully protected. And it protects both sides. It protects the enterprise and the entity with their intellectual property and secure data.

Or, be it a HIMSS, HIPAA data, right PHI, really protecting that. But it also protects the user, right? The user's phone is also completely partitioned. So your company has no idea what's happening on your phone. From a soldier perspective, that's great. But you can think about it from a position.

or nurse perspective That personal liability aspect that HIPAA finds you're protected from. Because that HIPAA compliant information has never actually touched your person. Yeah,

right. The other thing that happens sometimes is that there are lawsuits or other things that happen where you wind up losing your whole phone and all of the stuff because of the co mingling of the data on the

device.

Yes, that's right. Exactly. You're right. So we protect against that. Again, no co mingling of data. Not even no co mingling. You know, and the big reason we're here, and kind of alluded to, is because The joke can start coming out already to the healthcare sector. You know, we grew up in the Department of Defense.

And the use case was much more around how do we put an operator into an environment where maybe they're conducting some sort of bandit type operations. They need to buy a burner phone. On that burner phone, they need to access , command information on a dirty, compromised network and still feel that it's protected, that the mission is safe.

You wouldn't think healthcare, but then really what you're thinking about is that's protecting data.

Yeah.

That's really what it is, right? At the core of the essence and when you think about the proliferation of reaches in the healthcare community, healthcare data is probably one of the most valuable assets.

For adversaries, it absolutely is.

Right, for adversaries. There's so

many things you can do from filing false claims to stealing identities. You know better than I do. I mean,

it's amidst the risk that's exposed there. And so we thought, hey, we've helped the DOD, we've helped the public mission.

Let's go help healthcare companies also protect their data with the same level of rigor and focus. I mean, I know as a private citizen, I would not like my healthcare data to be compromised and available on the web. So we're trying to do whatever we can.

I like the genealogy of starting with three letter H's and figuring it out for them and once you've got it figured out for them.

Do you think we would be maybe a little bit easier? Has that turned

out to be the case? Yes and no. Yes in that the tech works the way we expect it to work. Because we figured it out with the, probably the most intense and rigorous use cases we've had. Seven red keys and all the various things that go into that environment.

But what we sacrificed was the user experience. Right, and so what we're finding now in the healthcare space is that we use it. more as a notice on Hey, we want this virtual device to look and feel like an iPhone. We want it to look and feel very much like my actual iPhone. Yeah, and look, if you're a special forces operator, you're willing to compromise a little bit on the experience for the mission.

The good news is just as, I think it was in October, maybe late, early November, we just launched our new product, and it was a significantly more user experienced employee, which is why we're here now. Because we didn't feel like we were ready from a product standpoint,

it's going to be up a step from an experience standpoint, but still have all of that, back end potential.

So easy for me to say, but what's the reaction been? We've had a lot of people come through and have conversations and look, what are they I'm

It's going to sound like , I'm, I know you're guessing here.

I know it's been shockingly positive. was anticipating a lot more, what or why or you guys are a defense company. Like, why are you here? Once we show the app and have those interactions, people, the lightbulb is gone. We had one senior director of a hospital network, come over and say, I've been trying to solve this problem for six years.

I've talked to every MDM company, it doesn't solve it the way I want it to solve. You guys are actually doing this. Why have we never talked before? I was like, well, one, my product wasn't ready before, but we're talking now. And that seems to have been the common reaction. We're feeling , very good about things.

We've got some work to do on a few areas, we think, some opportunities, , but really positive.

I mean, I'm

excited for it. It is a coping problem. It's a problem that we've had in healthcare for a long time. And they are solving that problem in a unique and interesting way. Yeah. So let me ask you about the name.

Okay. Where did that come from? So the name

Hypori is a deep cut Star Wars reference. I had to ask when I started as well. Apparently, the early days, the company is built on Android OS. Okay. From the back end. Yeah. Right. So Android and that concept of Droids has always been a part of the, essence of it In our early days when we were on prim solution, our servers were named after planets in the Star Wars ecosystem.

And ultimately when the company had to come out with an actual name to write this off the table and all, the Star Wars record was on the table. But they found that Hypori, one of the planets that droids were produced on, that was mentioned in one video game at one time was open for us to take that trademark and brand.

We threaded that needle in our internet. Engineers love it. So the Star Wars guys at work enjoy it. it's an interesting story. It's not a bad name.

A

lot of us are kind of nerds. In a lot of ways, so that we're having that kind of touch of cool Especially in the cyber security space, absolutely.

Yeah, those guys eat it up. That's great. One of the things that happens often when I do these interviews is that we talk about the person, we talk about the company on an issue, we talk about the company, we talk about the name, but there's always something new. When we turn off the camera, the person says, Man, I wish I would have reminded you to ask me about this.

Yeah.

So this is your chance for me to say, What am I not asking you that you

probably want to talk about? I think the biggest thing that we didn't touch on is the ease of use and the ease of study. You're not going to have to go through a big, laborious technical integration or those implementation services and people running around for months trying to get it to work.

Yeah. It can be split up in a matter of days, right? We work with the IT department. We put them in a user and we send them a QR code. They click the QR code. They go through whatever authentication they need to incorporate around it. And they need to guess what code your information is. Because it's all managed in the backend on a cloud that we internally scale on behalf of our customers.

It's a very simple process. The ease of setup is, yeah, it's like a long time software guy. You provide your value quickly. One of those. Sure.

And so every individual that wants to use it then gets a QR code. They get a unique, that's how they get the download.

Oh, I have it on my phone , I could show yeah, I'll give you a little show real quick.

I actually have a government. Level four. And then I have my employee, our internal eat our, we don't eat our own dog food. We're a classy operation. We drink our own cheese. I like that.

I actually

made the eat my own dog food reference earlier. Yeah. So this is better. So we drink our own champagne.

I go in and then this is effective with my corporate environment. My email, my team, my Google, everything is secure. It looks just like a regular iPhone. It's just like a regular phone I can type and use.

And multiple apps. Multiple apps. I'm a control freak. I like to organize things so you can see all my folders structured it literally. Just, looks

like a regular iPhone. Looks like a phone, but it's not on your phone.

It's all streaming. This is all all streaming. Not on my phone.

Thanks for the conversation. Enjoy the rest of the show. I'll definitely see you around campus. Perfect and Drex. I appreciate you taking time to talk to us. For sure. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thanks

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