Protenus receives $3M in series A funding

Protenus, a company that is established an analytics platform intended to stop data breaches and secure patient information, recently gained $3 million in funding from investors to advance research and product development.

Kaiser Permanente Ventures and F-Prime Capital Partners invested in Protenus in its series A funding.

Protenus collaborates with several healthcare systems and hospitals across the country, and is capable to secure data for more than 44 million patients.

“This extra funding will assist us explore the cost and benefits of different kinds of products built off of our analytics platform to understand what is most needed in healthcare and how we can help best,” claims Nick Culbertson, the company’s CEO.

Protenus utilizes artificial intelligence techniques to better understand workflows in the healthcare industry, and the approach enables it to distinguish unsuitable access to patient information.

“We develop profiles on patients based on what kind of treatment they are getting, and we build profiles based on human resources data to understand what type of employees are accessing patient data,” Culbertson states.

In the year of 2016, over 27 million patient records were breached, as reported by the Protenus Breach Barometer, and so far this year, there has been an average of at least one health data breach a day, with 40% of them a result of insider access.

“We use system access logs to explain how certain kinds of workers are accessing (records of) certain kinds of patients throughout that care workflow process. In other words, we develop the clinical workflow in a virtual environment and understand how employees are virtually passing medical records from one to another,” says Culbertson.

Protenus expects to be able to use its platform to identify other anomalies in those workflows, enabling it to catch problems such as prescription abuse, fraud or other types of medical anomalies.

“We like to consider it [Protenus] as a tool to cause cultural reform, because a lot of individuals are doing things because they do not realize it is illegal, and so when you are able to identify it early, educate them and remind them that they are abusing access to sufferer data, that is a chance to educate and stop that in the future,” says Culbertson.