Mimecast Helps Ease The Pain Of Health-Care IT

With all of the IT challenges within the health-care industry today, IT executives are looking for a little piece of sanity that a good vendor could provide them. Miguel Llopiz, vice president of the health-care sector at Mimecast, finds it remarkable how health-care CIOs handle all of their day-to-day responsibilities while still finding time and resources for innovation. Mimecast’s goal is to take some of the pain, and cost, away from these IT executives from cloud to email environments.

HCITS: How does Mimecast cater to health-care payer and provider IT executives? What are you doing in the health-care space?

Llopiz: Mimecast brings to bear a very powerful mix of capabilities aimed at distinct value propositions—compliancy and collaboration—while leveraging the cloud to attain much lower costs. We provide a cloud-based service that delivers collaborative HIPAA security and privacy, and compliance enablers that enhance the current mail platform, while reducing complexity and costs. We expand the capabilities that the current email system delivers while driving huge efficiencies in the IT organization. It completely aligns with health-care initiatives to drive costs down while delivering better service.

HCITS: Are there any new products or services that you would like to share with our audience?

Llopiz: We have spent a lot of time speaking to our current health-care customers as well as prospective clients, thus, have been able to align our existing suite of cloud-based services to their individual requirements. Additionally, we have learned that many are using either an inefficient mix of independent products or using such products in a manner for which they were not intended. Either way spells deficiencies and skyrocketing costs. What we are doing is delivering a unified approach to email management, where customers can leverage investments or consolidate disparate applications at much reduced cost and complexity.

HCITS: Do you have a specific example of this unified approach?

Llopiz: Our mobility products and services allow for BYOD deployment and bring 100 percent continual access to email, and archive for the mobile health-care worker. Even better, it does this seamlessly and inexpensively. Of the many new capabilities we are delivering, I am excited about our MSO4 (Mimecast Services for Outlook), which tightly integrate with the user interface and deliver contextual “on demand” retention, security and privacy policies. This allows IT to manage the compliance burden through good procedural mechanics. In addition, we are investing in some revolutionary technologies that provide high-level analytics that extract particular insights from our archive. In the future, we can shape these tools to the specific needs of not only our health-care clients, but also address custom requirements for many of our customers.

HCITS: How does Mimecast help health-care IT executives stay ahead of the curve in the health-care industry today?

Llopiz: This is very basic: We take the pain and cost of managing their email environment, thus liberating IT staff to direct their attention to the many other areas and initiatives that they have to support—again, doing more with fewer headaches. Our mantra includes our five Cs of IT: reducing cost and complexity while offering compliant and continuous collaboration.

HCITS: What is the biggest IT trend that you are seeing in the health-care industry today, and how are you addressing that trend?

Llopiz: IT executives are burdened with a tremendous amount of responsibilities, applications to support and initiatives to manage. Frankly, I don’t know how some of these folks do it! They have less budget, time and resources at their disposal. This presents a unique scenario in that they are also being asked to maintain an increasing portfolio of services, compliance initiatives, resources, applications, thus, vendor relationships. The challenges are great and the solutions are many, but the real efficiency is in ensuring these solutions address real concerns and not become shelf-ware. Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the cloud and bring about cost effectiveness and simplicity, and most offerings come in an all-or-nothing format. What we can provision are ways for them to leverage the efficiencies cloud technologies can potentially deliver, but not have to face the mountainous challenges in bringing these technologies to full use in a short time period. We can activate our services in days for incredibly low costs.

HCITS: What will Mimecast be presenting at the Healthcare IT Summit?

Llopiz: We will be showcasing success stories from our broad customer base and introducing new products and enhancements, as well as new partnerships that will please current and future clients.