BlackBerry Limited has made enough interesting moves in the healthcare realm lately that its acquisition of a secure communications provider is worth keeping an eye on.
The company recently bought Secusmart of Germany to improve its own “security solutions to keep up with the growing complexity of enterprise mobility,” BlackBerry CEO Jon Chen said in a prepared statement, at a time when devices are “being used for more critical tasks and to store more critical information, and security attacks [are] becoming more sophisticated.”
The acquisition follows BlackBerry's taking a stake in NantHealth back in April, with the intent to advance supercomputing in healthcare, and the company's making Axial Exchange’s patient engagement app available via the BlackBerry World store for BlackBerry Z3, Z10 and Z30 models.
Whereas its two earlier moves were specific to healthcare, BlackBerry will obtain Secusmart’s voice and data encryption and anti-eavesdropping technologies, offerings that to date have been targeted at government agencies around the world and large enterprises engaging in classified communications.
Secusmart Managing Director Hans-Christop Quelle said the combination of the two companies enhances their ability to combat electronic eavesdropping and data theft, the latter of which is a growing problem for healthcare entities.
Ponemon’s annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security found that criminal attacks on hospitals skyrocketed 100 percent in the last four years. And BlackBerry’s bid for Secusmart comes amid increasingly loud chatter about the potential for secure texting solutions to enhance the doctor-patient relationship and, of course, mandated privacy and security rules around protected health information.
The question is whether BlackBerry will find any value in tuning Secusmart’s anti-data theft or voice and text encryption technologies, which the companies claimed already meet stringent security requirements of its customer base, to appeal to healthcare entities and make them HIPAA-compliant.
The BlackBerry-Secusmart deal is, of course, subject to regulatory approval.
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