Case Study: Mercy Flights
“Cybersecurity reduces our liability. We’re a healthcare organization, so one attack can cripple our ability to service our patients. We engaged Kelley Create to shore up our strategies.“
Sheila Clough, CEO, Mercy Flights
When the nation’s first civil air ambulance company is flying from point Alpha to point Bravo trying to save a life, cybersecurity shouldn’t be top of mind. We help make sure it stays that way.
Sheila Clough took over as CEO of Mercy Flights a little more than a year ago. As she was assessing the company from 10,000 feet, she saw trends we see a lot. When companies put their head down and do business, time can go by and new vulnerabilities can go undetected in the day to day, even for their existing IT partners. That’s the polite way of saying it. ‘It kept me up at night,’ gets to it a little quicker.
“We did a quick assessment of opportunities for our success, and our technology was fairly limited,” Ms. Clough said.
“Cybersecurity made me extremely concerned. It’s easy for attackers to be able to get into our important, confidential information. We’re a healthcare organization,” she continued, “One attack can cripple our ability to service our patients.“
The constant change of the way people work today added an extra dimension of challenges.
“Remote workers add a layer of vulnerability,” Ms. Clough said. “Onsite, our network could cover security fairly quickly. We asked Kelley Create to help with those preventions and practices everywhere.”
As with all our partners, we were able to quickly run diagnostics to analyze immediate threats and vulnerabilities created by gaps in their security. With the added layer of HIPAA and patient privacy, Mercy Flights is just one of a number of growing businesses where cybersecurity infrastructure can be nearly as important as the business itself.
Though cybersecurity work is never done, we’re well on our way to accomplishing our mission. “People put their trust in Mercy Flights,” added Ms. Clough. “We rely on partners like Kelley Create to allow us to have the trust and assurance in IT so we can focus on our mission: Taking care of patients.”
Industry: Healthcare. Company Size: Small business. Locations: Southern OR, Northern CA. Services: Cybersecurity
“We rely on partners like Kelley Create to allow us to have the trust and assurance in IT so we can focus on our mission: Taking care of patients.”
Sheila Clough, CEO,
Mercy Flights