Steve Yaskin is CEO of Health Gorilla and probably the only non-lawyer who has read the entire 21st Century Cures Act, and decided that there was a business buried in it. If we are going to fix the data access problem and then move that data to where it is needed in the patient care experience, it’s a good bet that Health Gorilla’s health information network will be a big part of that future. Steve told me about the company, its technology for patient identity and matching (among others), and what it means to be an official QHIN exchanging data using FHIR. Will consumers and providers on their behalf demand access to data? Steve & Health Gorilla have raised over $80m to bet “yes”, and are doubling revenue every year–Matthew Holt
Bluesky Ahead
BY KIM BELLARD
I’ve been thinking about writing about Bluesky ever since I heard about the Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative, and decided it is finally time, for two reasons. The first is that I’ve been seeing so many other people writing about it, so I’m getting FOMO. The second is that I checked out Nostr, another Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative, and there’s no way I’m trying to write about that (case in point: Jack’s Nostr username is: npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m. Seriously).
It’s not that I’ve come to hate Twitter, although Elon Musk is making it harder to like it, as it is that our general dissatisfaction with existing social media platforms makes it a good time to look at alternatives. I’ve written about Mastodon and BeReal, for example, but Bluesky has some features that may make sense in the Web3 world that we may be moving into.
And, of course, I’m looking for any lessons for healthcare.
Bluesky describes itself as a “social internet.” It started as a Twitter project in December 2019, with the aim “to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.” At the time, the ostensible goal was that Twitter would be a client of the standard, but events happened, Jack Dorsey left Twitter, Elon Musk bought it, and Bluesky became an independent LLC. It rolled out an invite-only, “private beta” for iOS (Apple) users in March 2023, followed by an Android version in mid-April (again, invite-only). People can sign up to be on the waitlist. There are supposedly over 40,000 current users, with some million people reportedly on the waitlist.
Continue reading…Anil Jain, Chief Innovation Officer, Innovaccer
For a while now Innovaccer has been aggregating data from different databases around health systems (think different EMRs). They have been overlaying information over that data to clinicians and providers for thinks like care gaps. Now they are bringing in claims data to look for patients or plan members, and of course they have their own AI chatbot to help make that data more accessible to clinicians and administrators. Chief Innovation Officer at Innovaccer Anil Jain, who in a former life was at Cleveland Clinic spinoff Explorys (a data pioneer that got sucked into IBM), told me about Innovaccer’s tech and where the providers and payers using their tools are now — Matthew Holt
