Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Cybersecurity in Healthcare Private Equity: Insights from Clearwater’s John Santana 5-13-25
13 May 2025
In this episode, John Santana, Principal Consultant at Clearwater Security, joins Scott Becker to discuss the evolving cybersecurity landscape in healthcare private equity. He shares best practices for due diligence, post-acquisition risk management, and key takeaways from Clearwater’s groundbreaking Cyber Risk Benchmark Trend Report.
Full Episode
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Thrilled this past week to pass 7 million downloads and to get to the spot we're ranked for the last couple of weeks, the very top of the Apple Business News chart rankings. We're excited today to be joined by John Santana.
John is a principal consultant at Clearwater Security, and he focuses on private equity firms assessing their cybersecurity risks across their portfolio of healthcare investments. He's also served as lead author on the Cyber Risk Benchmark Trend Report on Healthcare PE that Clearwater recently published. John, can I ask you to take a moment to tell us a bit about yourself and about Clearwater?
Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Scott. And congratulations on those impressive metrics. You got me all nervous now. I'm on the Joe Rogan of business podcasts.
No, no, no, no. You're fantastic and no reason to be nervous. And God bless you. Tell us a little about yourself and Clearwater Security.
Yeah, so I've been at Clearwater going on four years now. I'm a principal consultant there, and I lead our private equity services delivery in our digital health, health IT team. And Clearwater is the largest pure play healthcare cybersecurity compliance firm tailored just to serving the healthcare industry.
I mean, we have targeted teams and verticals serving integrated delivery networks, digital health, health IT companies, and physician practice management groups. And yeah, we also work directly with law firms and private equity firms specializing in health care. You know, our genesis, we really started off more in the risk advisory compliance space as HIPAA wizards, if you will.
And we've really evolved in the last five years, especially into a full blown man security services provider business. I've been along for that ride and that transformation, and it's been really fantastic watching the firm evolve and growing with it personally. So, yeah, it's been a great run.
John, we've had a chance to watch Clearwater grow over the years. It's impressive what you folks have done. When you look at private equity firms that invest in healthcare, they acquire healthcare organizations. What kind of unique cybersecurity challenges do they face? And how do these risks differ than some of those in other industries?
Absolutely. Well, I mean, the short answer is the highly nuanced regulatory complexities, right? I mean, some of these portfolios will have a pharma startup, a contract research organization, a revenue cycle management company, and then a big old DSO with 500, 900 locations. And every Totally unique business cases, totally unique challenges, and totally unique regulatory requirements.
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