About

After graduating from Seton Hall Law School and working in private practice Eric Welsh Gross joined St Josephs’ Healthcare System as associate general counsel in 2011 before leaving to join Vitals (known as Sapphire Digital as of February 2019) in his current role as general counsel and chief compliance officer in 2014. This being his first general counsel position it is a key moment in his career providing him with opportunity to put into a leadership role his extensive healthcare legal and compliance experience and to begin working in the technology sector. In addition to providing enterprise software services, Sapphire Digital operates two consumer facing websites, namely vitals.com and ucomparehealthcare.com. Each of these websites help consumers choose a healthcare provider by providing the consumer with information to choose a provider, including ratings and reviews on the provider. Its websites contain over six million ratings and reviews on healthcare providers, which is more than any other website on the internet. Gross identifies that, ‘recently, ratings and reviews have become a significant data point for any consumer when shopping for a product, whether it be a television or earphones. The same is starting to become true for healthcare, and consumers are leveraging that information to choose a healthcare provider on a more frequent basis’. Due to increasing data management, Sapphire Digital and other healthcare companies are implementing technical measures to prevent data stealing by bots or other methods. Gross as part of the data team, developed a strategy to determine the identity of the companies stealing our data and require them to either: pay us for the data through a license; or cease using the data. Gross identifies that, ‘we commenced this strategy in the summer of 2016, and since then we targeted three companies. As a result of our actions, we entered into data licensing agreement with two of the companies in which they pay Sapphire Digital for use of the data within their product. The third company agreed to cease using the Sapphire Digital data in their software. We are currently assessing other companies that are stealing such ratings and reviews. These results were great for the company and my department, as not only did we protect a significant intellectual property asset of the company, but we also turned the legal department into a revenue generating department of the company’. Since joining in 2014 as the first general counsel and chief compliance officer at the company, Gross has implemented new security practises to keep up with the ever changing data security necessities of such a data sensitive industry. Prior to his commencement, there was no in-house attorney and a very minimal security and privacy program at the company, Gross has made a major impact.