Introducing Matt Pfeffer: 1upHealth’s new Director of Health Informatics

This summer, Matt Pfeffer joined 1upHealth as Director of Health Informatics. We recently had a chance to catch up with Matt to learn about his background and his new role at 1upHealth.

Tell us a little bit about your background.

I started my career as a journalist. I only did it for a year, but it was a formative experience. I worked at a nationally-recognized business journal and started to learn what a team of driven, complementary, creative people can accomplish if they work together. Since then I’ve held increasingly senior roles in quality management, program management, product management, and health informatics.

What about your health informatics experience specifically? Can you provide an overview of what health informatics is?

Health informatics as a field of work includes a few different kinds of work, including setting up EHR applications in health systems and training clinicians to use them, analyzing large data sets, figuring out how to represent clinical concepts in reusable ways, and modeling and standardizing health data for interoperability and data exchange. 

My main focus is that last part – using the HL7 FHIR data standard – which, of course, is also at the core of 1up’s business. In real-world terms, this is the work of gathering and organizing health information and preserving its meaning so that we can use it again in other contexts and for other purposes. 

I’ve been building healthcare data products for the past 15 years. I first started contributing to health data standards in 2012, and started using FHIR in products in 2015. Most recently, before joining 1upHealth, I was Staff Health Informaticist at Flatiron Health, which I joined in 2020 and which was my first dedicated health informatics role. 

I led a number of successful health informatics projects at Flatiron, including updating their oncology-focused EHR to meet ONC certification requirements for data interoperability using FHIR. I also led informatics support for Flatiron’s suite of clinical research products, including FHIR-based data exchange between EHRs and the electronic data capture systems used by trial sponsors. I was also fortunate to serve as a member of the steering committee for the Vulcan FHIR accelerator, focused on using FHIR to support clinical trial use cases. 

It seems like you held very different kinds of roles before focusing on health informatics. Can you elaborate?

In some ways that’s really true! But I’ve discovered meaningful and powerful similarities between them, too, especially when it comes to working effectively with people with different functional roles and expertise. So much of the work we do in healthcare data and technology is cross-functional. You need teams that combine clinical, engineering, product, business, and data expertise, and that requires discipline and intent in clarifying and getting alignment on the problems we want to solve and the value we want to deliver – the same way successful quality assurance, program, and product leadership do.

Health informatics has been the culmination of that kind of collaborative work for me, especially when I’ve contributed to healthcare data standards development, and never more so than at 1upHealth, where I’m working across the business to fully leverage informatics-driven approaches to a number of initiatives.

What more can you tell us about the work you’ll be doing at 1upHealth?

My first priority is making 1upHealth’s data quality systems even more efficient and expressive. Data quality is critical for any healthcare-related organization, and 1upHealth is responsible for the quality of the data we manage for all of our customers. So we’re further improving the ways we ensure data quality, especially by expanding the guidance and insight we provide to our customers so they have the tools and key information they need to understand and manage their data efficiently.

I’m also excited to continue with standards development work – sharing knowledge about 1upHealth’s customer use cases and experience building solutions – to help HL7 Da Vinci workgroups, WEDI, and the broader healthcare data standards development community define, test, and improve on those standards and ultimately make healthcare better for all of us.

Tell us about what you do outside of your work at 1upHealth.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and 13-year-old stepdaughter. My wife is a public health nurse. I grew up in the Northeast, so I really enjoy the temperate climate and the diverse geography in coastal California, and take advantage of it as best I can, either hiking or just walking around urban and suburban neighborhoods. I also love having constant access to so much fresh food. I miss having real seasons though! When I’m inside I often find some time to read, but it’s even harder these days with so many good TV shows.