Startup Spotlight: healthKERI
How Jared Jeffery, founder and CEO of healthKERI, used his “second lease on life” to secure the future of health data.
healthKERI exists because healthcare impacts everyone—not in some abstract sense, but in deeply personal ways. The founders of healthKERI know firsthand how critical modern technology is in healthcare settings, and they’re also aware of its security risks. Now, healthKERI is committed to ensuring that this technology no longer serves as an invitation for bad actors, preventing the care disruptions they cause.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
The Startup Using innovative cryptographic technology, healthKERI solves the challenging problem of online authenticity by reducing hackers’ available attack surface to a single, cryptographically infeasible point of attack.
The Challenge Just as the system that checks the Five Rights of Medication Administration ensures patient safety by verifying the right patient, medication, dose, timing and route, the healthcare industry must adopt a “check every time” method to ensure data safety.
“Last year, there were 133 million medical records breached in the U.S. alone,” said Jared Jeffery, founder and CEO of healthKERI. “The average healthcare breach costs $11 million, compared to about $4.5 million in other industries. Our SaaS eliminates all of the primary attack vectors leveraged by bad actors.”
The consequences extend beyond financial losses. Hacker groups have started extorting patients directly after breaches, threatening to release sensitive medical information or sell it on the dark web. Now more than ever, health data security is a top priority for companies and consumers alike.
The Story Jeffery has been working on various aspects of healthcare’s broader interoperability problem for over a decade, most recently with organizations like KLAS Research.
“About two years ago, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. Following that battle, I decided it was time to take on the risks associated with starting a business. At the same time, I was introduced to a new open-source, open-standard technology (KERI - the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) that’s recently been adopted with success in other industries,” Jeffery said. “We brought the inventor of that technology onboard and formed HealthKERI to take my second lease on life and make a difference.”
The Solution The key event receipt infrastructure (KERI) enables zero-trust data exchange without relying on third-party certifiers. healthKERI brings this technology to healthcare, offering self-certifying, authentic data exchange without shared governance. healthKERI prioritizes scalable, seamless, and secure data exchange by utilizing open-source technology that replaces certificate management and eliminates reliance on third parties. By removing shared secrets such as usernames, passwords and X.509 certificates, healthKERI makes data highly resistant to phishing attacks and creates an end-verifiable, channel-agnostic solution adaptable to any communication environment.
Additionally, healthKERI introduces an automated, open-source method to check the “Five Rights of Secure Health Data”—the right data, source, role, purpose and route—by applying secure digital signatures to every transaction and verifying those signatures on the receiving end.
The Future “healthKERI’s technology is transformational,” Jeffery said. “Recently I attended a session hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology that claimed 30 percent of the world’s data is health data. Our grand vision is that that massive healthcare ecosystem is free from worries about data theft, data exposure, or ransomware attacks. We believe that our solution represents a significant step forward in pursuit of that goal.”
As of July 2024, healthKERI officially launched their first proof of concept with the Health Sciences South Carolina, showcasing healthKERI’s ability to securely send data using cryptographic digital signatures.
How MATTER Helped “MATTER has been a great platform for learning as a founder,” Jeffery said. “They [MATTER] recently entered a partnership with KLAS Research, whose data is well-regarded, this partnership gives us as startups access to an ecosystem of research and customer feedback that would be difficult for us to get to otherwise.”
About MATTER
At MATTER, we believe collaboration is the best way to improve healthcare. The MATTER collaborative includes more than 1,000 current and alumni startups from around the world, working together with dozens of hospitals and health systems, universities and industry-leading companies to build the future of healthcare. Together we are accelerating innovation, advancing care and improving lives. For more information, visit matter.health and follow @MATTERhealth.
About healthKERI
healthKERI is a venture-backed startup that enables healthcare organizations to exchange data securely. healthKERI has established robust new protocols and practices for clinical data exchange that mitigate most data exchange cybersecurity risks, without requiring vendor lock-in.