3539: ShelterZoom CEO on Keeping Care Moving When Systems Go Down

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Tech Talks Daily podcast. Got a great guest lined up for you today. She's the CEO of a company called ShelterZoom. And she's the driving force behind Spare Tire, which is a solution that helps to keep hospitals operational, even when their core systems fail or are under attack.

[00:00:23] And together, we're going to explore the growing reality of EHR downtime, why executives are rethinking preparedness in the face of mounting cyber threats, especially at a time where hospitals seem to be the number one target. And I want to learn more about how uninterrupted access to patient data is starting to look less like a bonus and more like a global standard for safe care.

[00:00:49] I will also look at everything from financial risk to patient safety and just enjoy a nice conversation that looks at what happens when healthcare moves from reactive recovery to true operational resilience. Before introducing today's guests, I just want to give a big thank you to my friends at Denodo, who are helping enterprises make sense of the data world.

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[00:01:58] So if you're finally ready to make sense of the data world, visit Denodo.com today. But now, let's get today's guest on. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Yeah. My name is Chao Ching Sholand.

[00:02:17] I'm the co-founder and CEO of Shoutizen, which is a deep tech company and focusing on solving some of the biggest challenges faced by the industry, various industries. So through our eight-year innovation, we have actually created three platforms.

[00:02:36] So from the document tokenization, which is our invention to create the world's very first document token to fully protect your content files, to track for you to own your content documents. And two, the EHR downtime resiliency, which is through a product called Spare Tie. And it's dedicated for healthcare solving the EHR downtime problem.

[00:03:00] Now we are creating the third platform, which is going to be launched very soon, is to eliminate AI hallucination, data inaccuracy, and the data leak through a caused by AI. So we're basically providing a very simple plug and play you can integrate, and then it can make sure your data is so accurate and so secure, the AI threat is going to be eliminated as well.

[00:03:24] So really the whole dedication of our companies solving major cyber issues or anything like a risk, you will expose your organization or your clients, your patients, and making sure everyone gets protected. Wow. And I'd love to dig a little bit deeper on the problems that we're talking about here before we talk about tech and solutions.

[00:03:48] Because healthcare leaders, they often talk about the need for greater resilience, yet downtime events still hold care. I think we've seen examples of that on both sides of the pond. And I'm curious, from what you're seeing, how are CIOs and CISOs, how are they rethinking their preparedness now as they look towards 2026? And especially the EHR interruptions are becoming so regular this year. It's a regular threat rather than a rare one now.

[00:04:17] So what conversations are you having here? Yeah. So if you look at the awareness from the awareness point of view and all the executives, like the leaders in hospital systems or even ambulatory, they definitely are more educated now. And they are aware it's really one of the biggest challenges. However, how they take the approach is very different. So you have very innovative or leading type of hospital systems or healthcare institutions.

[00:04:47] They genuinely take a more proactive approach and they want that problem solved. And they don't just like sit there and waiting for someone to hand the solution to you. And then everyone else already adopted, you become a follower. Because in this world, if your hospital gets like a, doesn't matter, it's ransomed or just system goes down. Like last year, the cloud strike, it took down 750 hospitals inside the United States. So it's a big problem.

[00:05:16] Doesn't matter the cause of that. And you need to be prepared and take a more proactive approach. But we still, unfortunately, do see a lot of, you know, sea level people still very much in a passive weight and sea kind of mood. And I think it's a really good time for them to rethink how they actually address this challenge.

[00:05:37] Yeah, and I think the Ascension incident showed how downtime can delay surgeries and even slow life-saving decisions there. So when you speak with hospital executives, when you're sat in front of them, what part of that story resonated most? And what does it reveal about the cost of disruption in real clinical settings?

[00:05:59] I think everyone's concerned, January, January concerned from the Ascension to change healthcare, which impacted like more than 95% of all the healthcare systems, right? So I think they really understand that the costs and also the downtime duration is not like a few hours anymore. You could go down for two, three months even without any system in place, just pen and paper. And you cannot turn patients away because they have illness.

[00:06:28] They have to come to your hospital, get treated. You can't do that either. Then your cash flow runs out. So if your cash flow runs out, typically every hospital carries 45 to 60-day cash, right, to continue operating. But during ransom, it's not only you're paying the ransom, plus your cash flow is really very limited because your insurance claim cannot come back. And then now inside the United States, I'm not sure about the UK, is they're really implementing 48-hour window.

[00:06:56] You have to submit for pre-authorization before you do any surgery procedure. And within 48 hours, you have to submit. Otherwise, you can't get your reimbursement. So it's a very challenging situation. I think generally hospitals are so well aware of that now after major incidents. What you have seen is only just one or two examples. It's literally so many hospitals got ransom over the time.

[00:07:24] Probably not that well publicized, but they typically go down for 16 days to 27 days. And one of your solutions, spare tire. That positions uninterrupted EHR access as a new baseline. So I'm curious, how did that idea take shape? And what convinced you that fallback capability during an attack should be treated as a standard rather than just an operational safeguard? Yeah.

[00:07:53] So what happened was this really by incident, we found out this was the biggest problem faced by all the hospitals. So 2023, when we actually first introduced Document GPS, which is the document protection, tokenization, tracking solution into healthcare. Then we met with, I would say, probably over two dozens of hospital systems and presenting the solution.

[00:08:17] And everyone said, oh, this is great, but it's not our highest priority at the moment because we're facing a lot of cyber attacks and a lot of the EHR downtime and becoming more and more. So I actually was saying, hey, what is EHR downtime? Sorry for my naivety. I didn't even know what that was. So they actually told us, oh, you know, when the electronic health record system goes down and we just go pen and paper. And I was saying, what?

[00:08:47] You are looking after so many patients. How do you access the documents? How do you do the clinical notes, vital sign, do the transfer, do the medication? Nothing. Pen and paper. And then they also immediately told us because the new young generation of doctors, nurses never trained in their medical school. They all assumed EHR is always available. No one even know how to do the paper charting anymore. So that's the biggest problem now.

[00:09:16] It's completely not compliant. And nothing is electronic. Nothing can be audited. And after the system comes back, it takes them four times longer to reenter the data back into their primary EHR system. So we said, no, this can't be true. This can't be real. But we went to so many hospitals and very credible hospitals all telling us exactly this is what's happening.

[00:09:41] We went to the industry analysts and logged a call, say, hey, can you please validate? And they said, yeah. And several vendors attempted in the past, but no one put this through. So I admitted soil harm because they are thinking about IT system. They're thinking about disaster recovery, backup, which take time to restore. And often it's in the same cloud, in the same connector with their corporate system. Of course, it's not going to work because that's why you need a spare tire.

[00:10:09] When your car goes down, you have a spare tire, external spare tire. Quickly put that in. And like your backup generator, when your electricity goes off, you have a separate generator to keep you going. So that's how really we realized, wow, this is a massive problem. Even just for the humanity side, now we know this is a problem. We should try to help solve that. So it was a very deep journey last two and a half years or close to three years.

[00:10:37] But we're just so glad that we actually the first company succeeded, build a platform, can eliminate the EHR downtime. Wow. I mean, returning back to pen and paper is one thing. And many hospitals, of course, still rely on recovery plans that only actually activate after a breach has occurred. And so many different organizations are focusing on a more proactive than reactive approach now. So what patterns do you see in these reactive models?

[00:11:06] And how does an always available fallback, how does that change the way that clinical teams could work during an incident? Because it's so desperately needed, isn't it? Yeah. So even their downtime procedure, they kick in. So every hospital, every clinic does have a downtime procedure. So downtime procedure is mainly looking at read-only access for certain EHRs. If they do have that solution available, then use pen and paper to continue operating.

[00:11:34] But a lot of times, like clinics, they just call patients, they don't come in, we don't have system. And it lose a lot of, you know, the appointments. So, but the hospital is obviously much more urgent because they don't, they have patients like maybe in the middle of surgery, in the middle of, you know, getting treated. So the downtime, you know, that kind of very reactive mode is just generally just pen and paper. Every hospital is still on pen and paper.

[00:12:03] I haven't heard one is not on pen and paper. Yeah. It's, you know, after hundreds of hospitals engagement and, you know, zero, zeros on a life, like a frontline worker driven spare tire type of approach. Because our goal is to make frontline workers don't experience downtime. And the other more reactive ones is more about IT, how they take time to restore the backup system.

[00:12:30] It's a very different ballgame and a different approach. And it is a different approach because, as you said, shelter zoom is known for its patented tokenization approach and deep control at the file level. So how does that foundation influence the design of spare tire, especially when hospitals need both strict protection and zero interruption? And why tokenization? Yeah.

[00:12:57] So our company, shelter zoom, was kind of like became pretty well known for the blockchain tokenization technology. And so that actually led us into the cybersecurity space, the data protection and having real protection around your data, around your file, instead of just database level protection, which can cause ransom, can cause other type of incidents.

[00:13:21] So I think the awareness of the cyber posture and also the solutions could be truly innovative rather than just relying on traditional type of approach. It does, you know, help us shape up how we see the spare tire. And we want to become the spare tire, reliable spare tire, not some spare tire also goes down at the same time, right?

[00:13:44] So, but there were a lot of the technology and also the method challenges because with the current landscape of the healthcare, they're not so mature enough wanting to take on tokenization, you know, underlying technology. They're not so interoperable because interoperability is a big challenge, especially in the U.S. And so lots of things you have to navigate through and really provide the value. At the end of the day, people want to see value.

[00:14:13] If the value is there, they will come on board. But if the value is not there, it doesn't matter how fancy the technology is. So we just take a step-by-step approach, sorting out, it has to be external resiliency, a second stack, rather than relying on the primary corporate or EHR stack. Because if, say, like a few months, a few weeks ago, when the major cloud system goes down, everything goes down, right? It doesn't matter how good your backup system is. You don't have X accessibility anymore.

[00:14:43] So we basically have all the architecture ensure it's an external secondary system and it can be going anytime. So as we mature ourselves, we're including more and more like multi-cloud strategy. If you're on a certain cloud, you can choose another one, vice versa. And there's a lot of, you know, the future cybersecurity roadmap, resiliency roadmap we are looking at as well.

[00:15:10] And with ransomware, AI-driven attacks and business email compromise rising right across healthcare, we've seen many examples there. How are you seeing executive priorities shift, particularly around continuity, trust, and that pressure that they must be facing to keep systems live, even when in the middle of responding to an attack? So I actually have to say 2024, literally everyone's top priority is cybersecurity.

[00:15:38] It was just given everyone realize that's for survival. It's not even for a nice behave or something like getting extra something. That's for survival. And then now the cybersecurity whole thing came back again after the huge AI wave, right? So this year, most common organizations, unfortunately, got distracted by AI. And the AI actually now triggering more cyber attacks. So that's kind of a vicious circle.

[00:16:07] You always have to be stay on top of that. So now the hospital priorities coming back again, really shifting back into cybersecurity and making sure that actually is in place before they can deploy AI. So now we're becoming a foundational priority and that piece for them. So, yeah, I have to say the traction on spare tire is enormous. It's way beyond what we imagined.

[00:16:33] And because everyone needed that and they need that to be in place before they even can introduce more AI or other type of innovation. Spare tire, that sits inside a broader vision for cyber resilience at Shell to Zoom. So as we head towards 2026 and you start thinking about the next phase, what changes do you expect in how hospitals will govern their data,

[00:16:59] maintain visibility and ultimately keep care moving during those unexpected attacks? Yeah, I actually expect hospitals don't really have any tolerance anymore for that time. They really have to use that as a standard, like it's more a standard rather than just something nice to have. And because downtime triggers so much cost, right? Not only just the patient lives and that's the most, you know, critical part,

[00:17:27] but also the hospital really suffering from the reputational damage, from the stress of the doctors, nurses, staff. You know, really everyone's already burned out. And this actually adds another incredibly, you know, kind of high stress onto everyone. Plus the cash flow is a huge problem. Revenue, $1 to $8 million loss every day. So all these numbers adding up, they understand that the downtime is non-negotiable.

[00:17:53] So that's really where our spare time could actually, as a resiliency tool, not just the cyber resilience, even plant outage, you know, system outage, any time you have an outage and we can reduce your financial risks and also save patient lives. And I think that is a powerful moment to end on. But before I let you go, none of us are able to achieve any degree of success without some help along the way.

[00:18:18] Very often somebody sees something and has invested some time in us and inspires us along that journey. So I've got to ask, who are you most grateful towards that maybe helped you get you where you are, that we can give a little shout out to today? Who would it be and why? I think it's the other co-founder of Shout to Zoom, Alan El-Shahi.

[00:18:37] And he genuinely gave me such a big platform, big stage to show off my talent, to contribute, to, you know, help the world solve problems. Because I actually put a Thanksgiving post out on my LinkedIn the other day. And then I mentioned when I arrived in the U.S. 80 years ago, I'm from Australia, by the way. So, yeah, he was the only one I knew.

[00:19:04] So I knew no one in the whole entire country. So after, you know, we became partners and start working on Shout to Zoom, I really learned because my background is more enterprise architectural, chief architectural in the technology space, right? Innovation, technology, how we support business outcome. He's from the business side. So he really, like his way of handling things, think about what people need.

[00:19:30] And all this really inference how I think about, you know, our solution. How actually we can really maximize people's ROI and, you know, make sure the customers we serve truly see the value, truly see the, you know, the help we're giving them. And then plus the way he actually talks to people, very interesting just how he will tell the story.

[00:19:55] So simple because I actually very highly academic and people see me very like intellectual. And so my language sometimes a little bit too much for people, like they don't understand, for example. So after I actually really like worked with him for a period of time, my language became much more effective as well. So people really understand, oh, wow, you try to address this problem. How simple, how easy people understand the story.

[00:20:23] So he came up with this name called Spare Tire, right? And because I always came up with big ideas. So I actually was thinking, gee, I was describing to him this problem I tried to solve and how, you know, the frontline workers immediately get things going. And he said, oh, you try to build a spare tire. I said, oh my goodness, this is so amazing. So that's wonderful. Yeah, I think everyone, doesn't matter how much success they have,

[00:20:51] it generally requires a lot of people's support, a lot of people's help. And we learn so much from so many people. And I think, yeah, Alan Al-Shah, he's definitely the biggest influencer on my startup journey in the last 80 years. And now we're, you know, still very, very strong as a part, you know, our partnership grow. And then we try to really help deliver value back to hospitals and other industries. Wow, what an incredible story.

[00:21:19] And I think that is a beautiful moment to end on today. A quick shout out to Alan. And I probably blissfully on the scale of the impact he's had on you and how grateful you are for that impact as well. And for everybody listening wants to find out more information about ShelterZoom, SpareTire and everything we talked about today. Let me know the website, LinkedIn, socials, anything in particular you'd like me to point them to. Where can listeners go?

[00:21:46] Yeah, they can go to ShelterZoom.com. So S-H-E-L-T-E-R-Z-O-O-M.com or SpareTire.io. So SpareTire is like the cast, S-P-A-R-E-T-I-R-E at, oh, sorry, .io. So the other channel we use a lot is LinkedIn. So we are active on LinkedIn and a few other social media channels, but they can find us. Awesome. Well, I'll add links to everything you mentioned there.

[00:22:16] And we covered so much in a short amount of time, but I think it's just so important, this topic. And at a time where critical infrastructure, in particular hospitals, are under attack, and it is rising to the top of everybody's agenda. So just thank you so much for the work that you're doing and sharing your story here. Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Neil. Yeah, really a pleasure to talk to you. And also thank you for the opportunity.

[00:22:42] I think if the last few years have taught healthcare leaders anything at all, it's that downtime is no longer a rare crisis, but an expected risk that must be planned for. And my guest shared why fallback access, real continuity and fill level, file level protection are all becoming central to modern healthcare strategies.

[00:23:04] Along with that broader role Shelter Zoom is playing in protecting digital content far beyond the hospital walls. So to find out more about Shelter Zoom, SpareTire and their work, and how they're transforming healthcare resilient, head over to the website. I'll include links into the show notes. And as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode or how your organisation is preparing for the next inevitable disruption. You've heard from my guest. I'd love to hear from you.

[00:23:33] So as always, techtalksnetwork.com, LinkedIn, just at Neil C. Hughes. Let me know your thoughts. But that is it for today. So thanks as always. And I'll speak with you all again tomorrow.