apree health: Empowering developers and securing healthcare data with Google Workspace

With more than 30 clinics across the United States, in-house primary care services for large organizations, and a companion app designed to help patients easily access care, apree health is on a mission to improve lives and patient outcomes with technology. 

As a healthcare provider, protecting patient data is at the forefront of apree health’s business strategy. Its customers also have their own data and security standards, and they trust apree health to safely manage sensitive Protected Health Information (PHI). In addition to providing care, apree health is also a technology-based organization, which means it builds, tests, and iterates its own applications quickly. 

Combining the fast-moving world of software development with the stringent regulatory world of healthcare means that apree health needs software solutions that satisfy sometimes conflicting priorities. apree health’s previous collaboration suite was complex, and securing it required tedious, manual work. “We were using different agent-based security systems across the business resulting in a brittle, difficult to manage environment that couldn’t keep pace with our rate of change,” says Jeff Bryner, CISO at apree health. “It was just too complicated, bulky, and prone to error.”

With the company’s small security team supporting a global organization, it needed to simplify management while still empowering its developers. “Engineers look for tech that helps them work fast,” says Bryner. “They want tools that are collaborative, real time, accessible, and that integrate easily. And I’m looking for ways to make security simple and easy to understand. That’s where Google Workspace comes in.”

Uniting healthcare and security cultures with a simplified collaboration suite

With a fully integrated, web-based solution, the company can more easily connect and share information across global teams in real time. Both apree health’s technical and patient care teams can rely on this speed to accelerate internal processes and better serve patients. Being able to easily export data sets from BigQuery into a Google Sheet or directly through to Looker allows controlled access to shareable, real-time status updates. On the patient-facing side, care providers rely on Meet to interact with patients and use Slides to showcase healthcare tips and best practices on idle exam rooms’ screens.

From a security perspective, apree health has consolidated its identity management and monitoring capabilities into a single solution so its IT team can more efficiently manage a global workforce. “Using Google Workspace has made the difference between having to manage three or four different desktop agents’ interactions and managing our access controls in a single place,” Bryner says.

To ease the transition from its previous solution to Google Workspace and meet an aggressive deployment timeline, the company worked with Google Cloud Premier Partner, SADA, An Insight company. “Our team has technology expertise, but SADA provided the migration know-how and change management experience necessary to make the migration work,” says Bryner. 

SADA guided apree health through its formation as two companies merged their disparate tech stacks into a single organization. During this process, it helped apree health successfully migrate more than 1,200 employees from their previous solution in six months. It also provided more than 40 employee training sessions to facilitate company-wide change management processes. “They knew what it took to migrate certain datasets, what our user experience should look like, and what training we would need to make our rollout successful,” Bryner adds. 

Implementing zero trust with improved access controls

One of apree health’s key success metrics for the migration was achieving a zero-trust security strategy. Clearly defining access policies to limit who has access to data and when that data can be accessed ensures the company can protect its own information, its customers’ information, and their patients’ information. “Managing everything through our Workspace Admin console gives us visibility into what data is moving where and allows us to easily define who has access to it,” Bryner shares. “It’s superior to other platforms I’ve used because there’s no guesswork. When you change a control, you know exactly what the result will be.”

A consolidated admin panel has also made it easy for apree health’s small IT team to show customers and auditors exactly how the company is protecting its data. “An auditor recently asked us to demonstrate that we’re using multi-factor authentication,” Bryner says. “All I had to do was scroll through the Workspace Admin console and show them the checkbox that says ‘MFA.’ It’s that easy.” The company is also managing its devices with Google endpoint management to ensure secured data is only accessible on company devices or in specific locations. 

Accelerating collaboration with Gemini for Google Workspace

Following its successful migration to Google Workspace, apree health saw another opportunity to improve its teams’ collaboration experience by becoming early adopters of Gemini for Google Workspace. Even as it set out to pioneer generative AI (gen AI) use cases, the organization took a methodical approach to the implementation. “Not everyone has exposure to gen AI,” says Bryner. “They know it can generate whimsical poems, but we really set out to narrow the scope of possible business use cases—such as generating document templates or drafting emails—so we would know exactly how to train our team and get the most out of it.” Employees now use Gemini for idea generation to “overcome the tyranny of the blank page,” Bryner adds. 

Since Gemini is embedded into the full Workspace suite, it’s protected by the same security controls. This means that even physicians can use Gemini to organize patient notes, reframe internal messages, and refine patient-facing communications using gen AI.

Focusing on security to enable growth

apree health continues to search for new ways to optimize its workflows and elevate its security. It recently implemented Passkeys to offer its teams a passwordless sign-in option. Heightened login security, in combination with improvements to access management, have helped reduce credential attacks and improve the company’s overall security posture. Knowing this, the team can focus on working faster. “We have a completely different way of working than we did before,” says Bryner. “We can bounce between Sheets or Slides or Docs in real time and asynchronously with teams halfway around the world. Sharing information seamlessly means we can work faster to better serve our customers and their patients.”