Health System Venture Arms Invest in Cyber Risk Firm Censinet
The venture arms of several health systems participated in a recent $9 million funding round for healthcare risk management solutions vendor Censinet.
The funding, led by MemorialCare Innovation Fund including Rex Health Ventures and Ballad Ventures, brings the company’s total funding to more than $22 million. Existing investors LRVHealth, HLM Venture Partners, Schooner Capital, Excelerate Health Ventures, and Cedars Sinai, participated in the round as well.
The company said its Censinet RiskOps is “the world’s first and only cloud-based, HIPAA-secure risk exchange that enables healthcare organizations to share and manage risk data to strengthen cybersecurity.” It said it has close to 40 customers across health systems, health plans, and vendors.
“Healthcare is under siege from bad actors, with patient safety and care operations directly in the crosshairs,” said Caleb Winder, managing director of MemorialCare Innovation Fund, in a statement. “With hospitals and health systems facing narrowing margins and an acute talent shortage, Censinet has cracked the code on cyber risk management, delivering an affordable, fully automated solution that rapidly force-multiplies productivity and successfully brings providers, payers, and vendors together on a collaborative risk exchange to share cyber risk data. Our investment enables Censinet to scale that information exchange and to bring its offering to more industry participants, strengthening cybersecurity and safeguarding patient care for the long run.”
In a statement, Pam Austin, chief information officer for Ballad Health & senior IT adviser for Ballad Ventures, said that Censinet’s two-sided network approach for third-party risk assessment “is invaluable – to our information technology teams and team members throughout the health system, to our third-party vendors and, most importantly, to the patients and community we serve.”
The company said its Censinet RiskOps “delivers total automation across all third party and enterprise risk management workflows, processes, and insights.” It offers a Digital Risk Catalog of over 34,000 vendors and products, automated corrective action plans, and real-time portfolio management to allow customers to manage and mitigate third-party risk across the entire vendor and product lifecycle with an assessment completion time of less than 10 days, it claims.
“Censinet’s mission is to take the risk out of healthcare,” said Ed Gaudet, CEO and founder at Censinet, in a statement. “With the number of breaches escalating and ransomware now a direct threat to patient safety, the need for the healthcare industry to transform cyber risk management has never been more urgent. Censinet’s unique risk exchange enables providers, payers, and vendors to collaboratively manage third-party and enterprise risk, continuously improving risk posture in real-time and strengthening cybersecurity across all healthcare organizations.”
The company recently announced the Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study, co-sponsored by the American Hospital Association and KLAS Research, to establish and validate benchmarks across cybersecurity program KPIs as well as program coverage of NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) and HHS Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices (HICP).
