Auditory Implant Initiative

The Challenge

Auditory Implant Initiative is a nonprofit group of cochlear implant researchers, including surgeons, audiologists, and clinics around the country. The members each have their own practices and worked together to create this nonprofit entity. In order to collect data on cochlear implant patients, they created a cloud-based software system so each center could enter data into the system for research and analysis.

Auditory Implant Initiative manages protected health information for 43 different centers across the country, which trust them to keep the data safe. As such, they have engaged with NetSPI for penetration testing and security audits since 2017.

“Data collection and sharing policies for health care organizations are horribly complex,” said Dr. Jed Grisel, Otolaryngologist at Head and Neck Surgical Associates, and Co-Founder at the Auditory Implant Initiative. “We have our own policies and then every organization we partner with has their own as well. Being able to actually execute on a data sharing agreement is very difficult and for many of the organizations we partner with, they wouldn’t even consider a contract until we had an external penetration test in place. We couldn’t even do what we’re doing until we’d done proper penetration testing.”

Why Auditory Implant Initiative Works with NetSPI

1. Highly recommended by a security advisor: NetSPI came highly recommended by a security advisor Auditory Implant Initiative was working with who said they’d get great quality work and that the team was very knowledgeable about penetration testing. Auditory Implant Initiative has found the work NetSPI has done over the years to be very valuable and discovered vulnerabilities they were unaware of.
2. Great customer experience leveraging NetSPI Resolve™: “The NetSPI team is easy to work with. They gave all vulnerabilities to our team through a very easy process and the results were clear, making them easy to remediate. In addition, Resolve™ is easy to access and communicate through.”
3. Peace of mind and continued growth: Auditory Implant Initiative manages data for 40+ centers around the country and having a high-quality audit and penetration test to know their data is safe and secure has given their team and their partners peace of mind and confidence to continue their work. In addition, it is critical to have the regulatory documentation that penetration testing has been completed so they can continue to grow and work with additional centers.

Considering Working With NetSPI? Here’s What Dr. Grisel Would Tell You:

“It’s unfortunate that we live in a world where you have to spend the time on security. But this is a reality we live in,” said Dr. Grisel. “And you want to choose a group that gives you the best results while making the process as streamlined and painless as possible – and for us, that was NetSPI.”