My opening remarks | Paubox Spring Summit

Aloha! My name is Hoala Greevy and I am the Founder CEO of Paubox. I’m streaming to you today from Honolulu, where it’s windy and warm today.

If you aren’t familiar with our company, Paubox is for healthcare organizations seeking to remove friction from their HIPAA Compliant Email communications.

Paubox is a cloud-based, B2B SaaS solution that provides a seamless user experience for both senders and recipients of secure, compliant email.

Unlike incumbent solutions that force recipients to login to a portal to read a secure message, Paubox allows the recipient to read a secure, compliant email in their inbox, just like a normal message.

Takeaways from our last conference

Back in October, we hosted our third annual Paubox SECURE @ Home conference.

As you’d expect during a pandemic, it was virtual and I streamed in from a small town in Alaska.

One of my biggest takeaways from Paubox SECURE @ Home was that both our attendees and speakers were looking for ways to:

• Maintain relevance
• Expand their network
• Level up and learn new things

It’s precisely those insights that hatched our inaugural Paubox Spring Summit.

Paubox Spring Summit

Our theme for today’s Paubox Spring Summit is “Secure Communication During a Pandemic” and our speakers will be covering an array of topics around it.

We’ve got a stacked deck for you folks today.

Following my remarks, I’ll introduce our keynote speaker, Anshul Pande, CTO of Stanford Children’s Health.

Following Anshul and a five minute break, we’ll cover “A Valley of Innovation—Rapid Adoption of Technological Solutions to Address COVID-19” featuring Susan Ibanez, Chris Lindley, and Julie Jackson.

After that, we’ll segue to Tony UcedaVélez and his presentation, “The Cyber Threat Landscape Evolution: How the Pandemic Changed the Attack Surface in Healthcare.”

Following a ten minute break, our next panel will be moderated by Paddy Padmanabhan of the Big Unlock podcast. The topic will be “A Uniform Approach to Sharing Assurance and Other Certifications” and will feature Michael Parisi, Brian Kline, Michael Mead, and Howard Rosen.

After another ten minute break, our last panel will be, “The Future of Healthcare, IT Security, and Cybersecurity” and will feature Matthew Wallace, Terra Durbin, and Aaron Collins.

After some closing remarks by yours truly, we’ll cap things off with virtual networking so both speakers and attendees like yourself can expand your respective networks.

Personal news

Now before we get to all that, I’d like to share some related personal news.

I have a ring on my left hand and a bandaid on my left arm.

Yes, I recently got married at a fish pond here on Oahu and yesterday I got my first Covid vaccination shot.

The process was smooth and the nurse who administered my shot works for ALTRES, who is one of customers. I’m now a part of the national average of three million daily shots being administered in the U.S.

Digital Health accelerates during the pandemic

Prior to COVID-19, the fastest a vaccine ever developed was for mumps in the 1960s, which took four years. With science and technology, we saw the first Covid vaccine developed in less than 12 months.

The coronavirus vaccine wasn’t the only acceleration we saw. The Cloud, Big tech, E-commerce, SaaS companies, Robin Hood, and many digital health companies also saw explosive growth during the pandemic. We’re also a benefactor here.

Our Mission at Paubox

When we launched Paubox in Honolulu back in 2015, our mission was simple yet audacious: To become the market leader for HIPAA compliant email.

For starters, we saw a vacuum of leadership in the vertical and we intended to fill it.

Second, while it may seem like a niche within a niche, we saw vast opportunity within HIPAA Compliant Email.

U.S. Healthcare remains hopelessly addicted to the fax machine, with over 70% of communication still taking place via faxes.

There are vast opportunities for us within U.S. healthcare and we intend to achieve them.

Here’s how we plan to do it: Leadership, trust, compliance, and security.

Leadership

As we like to say at Paubox, if there’s a vacuum of leadership, a leader will fill it.

From the outset, we intended to behave as the market leader. This meant hosting our own conference, starting a podcast, building social proof, and giving back.

When it comes to social proof and third party reviews, we led the HIPAA Compliant Email industry in three categories of the G2 Winter 2021 report: Best Email Encryption Software, Best HIPAA Compliant Messaging Software, and Best Secure Email Gateway Software.

Last August we joined the Inc 500 List of fastest-growing private companies in America.

Last year we made Election Day a paid holiday at Paubox. In fact, we achieved 100% voter turnout within our ranks.

Lastly on leadership, we believe the leader always gives back. Several years ago we created the Paubox Kahikina Scholarship, whose primary objective is to encourage Native Hawaiians to pursue careers in computer science and software development.

The scholarship is recurring in nature. In other words, recipients receive $1,000 per year until they graduate (5 year maximum). In 2020 we tripled our new scholarship recipients, going from one to four concurrent awardees.

In fact our first recipient, Nick Wong, now works at Paubox and will be presenting later today.

Trust

One of our primary objectives is to provide clear pricing for all of our solutions. Simple objective. Not so easy to implement.

Last July we consolidated our product line from five to three solutions. In addition, we made pricing easy to understand by having it accessible via a single click.

We also introduced freemium models for Paubox Marketing and Paubox Email API. In fact, we even include a Business Associate Agreement with both paid and freemium accounts.

Our aim is to build trust by having clear, upfront pricing and easy methods to get started.

Compliance

On the compliance front, we’re pleased to announce we recently completed our HITRUST CSF recertification. Every two years, we’re required to undergo a full recertification for our HITRUST CSF status. We worked with Beyond LLC, a leading HITRUST CSF Assessor Organization, to help guide us through the process

HITRUST is the gold standard of information protection frameworks in the health care industry and we are thankful for our partnership with them, as Mike Parisi from HITRUST has been an ardent supporter of ours since we first met.

Security

When it comes to security, in January the National Security Agency announced guidance around weak encryption protocols.

In their January 5th announcement, they quickly got to the point:

“The National Security Agency (NSA) emphatically recommends replacing obsolete protocol configurations with ones that utilize strong encryption and authentication to protect all sensitive information… Network connections employing obsolete protocols are at an elevated risk of exploitation by adversaries.”

Here at Paubox, we took that as a call-to-action.

I’m pleased to announce we completed our platform upgrade and eliminated support for obsolete encryption protocols within two weeks of NSA’s guidance.

Here’s a simple list of security protocols now supported by Paubox:

• SSL v2 (Not Supported)
• SSL v3 (Not Supported)
• TLS 1.0 (Not Supported)
• TLS 1.1 (Not Supported)
• TLS 1.2 (Supported)
• TLS 1.3 (Supported)

In a nutshell, we dropped support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 and recently added support for TLS 1.3. This is in direct alignment with the NSA:

“NSA recommends that only TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 be used; and that SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 not be used.”

Paubox Spring Summit Keynote Speaker: Anshul Pande

Anshul Pande is the vice president and chief technology officer of Stanford Children’s Health, the only healthcare system in the San Francisco Bay Area dedicated to pediatric and obstetric care.

As CTO, Anshul is responsible for all aspects of technology selection, deployment, and delivery for Children’s Health.

Before joining Stanford Children’s Health, Anshul was the vice president and chief technology officer of ProMedica Health. There, he completed a multiyear technology transformation including an Epic deployment, two mergers, and a divesture. He was also with Epic for 10 years in various technical roles.

Fun fact, Anshul met his wife while working in Honolulu on a separate Epic deployment.

His educational background in manufacturing systems and industrial engineering along with his work experience has made Anshul a leader in digital innovation. His keynote today is “Digital First Healthcare in a Post Pandemic World.”

Without further ado, please take it away Anshul!