Tag Archives: Adrian Biesecker

BBC Biochemical, based in Mount Vernon, Wash., is a maker of the stains, reagents, and fixatives used for diagnostic and medical lab testing. The company shares a building and a network and phone system with its sister company, Medical Diagnostic Labs, which collects specimens and performs patient testing. Adrian Biesecker, CEO of BBC, tells IncTechnology.com that a new network and phone system helped the firm better protect patient data while improving customer service and productivity. Elizabeth Wasserman: What does your firm do? Adrian Biesecker: We make the stains, reagents, fixatives, and lots of solvents that are used in testing medical samples. If you go to the doctor to get a mole removed, the doctor puts the piece of tissue in a bottle. They bring that bottle to a lab. The lab runs it with different stains and fixatives and other chemicals used to determine an accurate diagnosis. We make the products that improve the accuracy for many different diagnoses — cancers, tumors, you name it. Wasserman: Your business is located in the same building as a sister company. How does that work? Biesecker: I own BBC Biochemical. My Dad owns Medical Diagnostic Labs. They’re housed under the same roof. Medical Diagnostic Labs is a clinical lab that runs tissue samples and blood culture. All that data has to stay very secure. , There are lots of regulatory agencies that require patient information held close to the heart. HIPAA [the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act] is one such regulation. With the two businesses being on the same network, we needed to make sure we could share results of how our products performed but not share patient information. Being able to be on the same network but only being able to share parts of information was a challenge. Wasserman: How did you address that challenge? Biesecker: We looked at many different options. We looked at many companies but they couldn’t provide the solution that Cisco was able to provide, encompassing everything including network, phone, mobility — all of the great things that we use today. Only one company could come to the table with all the appropriate technology. They were able to separate the information on a network with multiple VLANs to house the phone system across both companies and have it act like separate companies. We have routers here that have VLANs [virtual local area networks] and they keep all the data separate except what we choose to share. We can have multiple networks, subnets on the same router, and you can choose when you want to traverse or cross over to another VLAN. It keeps the information completely separate 24 hours a day until you choose actively to go across the network to get pieces of information that you’re allowed to get. We have to have results on our chemicals and how they perform, but we don’t want to get patient results. We want to know whether the stain we produced is as strong and intense as it should be. We need to keep that data accurate as far as different lots of product. Wasserman: What have the results been? Biesecker: Flawless. We don’t have any problems. With regard to BBC, it used to be we had a phone system where you could page or activate a speaker phone on the other end to see if anyone was there. It often took a long time to find someone and pin them down. With this installation we are able to get people quickly. We have a wireless solution so people can take their phone anywhere in the building. Everyone has to have their “Batphone.” We have many people who don’t just sit at desks and this helps everyone be more productive. It also gave us peace of mind. We don’t have to worry about data leaving the building or leaving the network it’s housed on.