Former National Coordinator Don Rucker, MD, Joins 1upHealth as Chief Strategy Officer

BOSTON – November 10, 2021 – Donald Rucker, MD, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has joined 1upHealth, a pioneering Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) platform for health data interoperability. Dr. Rucker joins 1upHealth as Chief Strategy Officer, the next step in his career-long commitment to making healthcare efficient and affordable.

As CSO, Dr. Rucker will help set the direction for 1upHealth’s ongoing innovations in FHIR-enabled computing and bring these to customers to help them meet the evolving clinical, technical, and reimbursement demands for modern data. 1upHealth is an interoperable, cloud-based FHIR platform that is unifying clinical and claims data to meet the compliance regulations of today and the analytical needs of the future to realize the full potential of FHIR for improving patient care and healthcare operations. The 1upHealth platform computes on FHIR data and connects customers to an ecosystem of payers, providers, app developers, patients, and biopharma. 1upHealth gives organizations the ability to meet the requirements of the CMS FHIR API rule while normalizing and aggregating data to be used accurately, and at scale, with a growing set of higher-level services on top of FHIR including smart search, batch loading, sophisticated end-user management, security, and more.

“I am excited to join 1upHealth because the team has built a unique software portfolio to provide customers scalable FHIR services with modern, computable architecture that will help link payers, providers, and the rapidly expanding healthcare app economy, all to give patients new and better care while securely protecting their privacy,” said Dr. Rucker. “The future of healthcare depends on broader access to standardized, normalized and highly computable data, enabling quality improvement and, ultimately, transforming the industry.” 

As a board-certified physician, Dr. Rucker has practiced emergency medicine in four states and was Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s first full-time attending in the emergency department. As National Coordinator at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), he led the development and issuance of ONC’s 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule which supports patient access and interoperability of health data. Dr. Rucker was also the co-developer of the first Microsoft Windows-based electronic medical record (EMR) in the world. His education includes an AB from Harvard, an MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA in Business and an MS in Medical Computer Science and Informatics from Stanford University. 

“We have a deep respect for Dr. Rucker’s work and are thrilled to welcome him to the team,” said Ricky Sahu, CEO and Founder of 1upHealth. “Dr. Rucker brings the unique perspective of a physician, software engineer, product developer, and policy leader at the highest levels, and few people in the world have this breadth of experience and understanding of the industry. As the father of ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule, Dr. Rucker knows that was just the first step—organizations need to go beyond merely complying with the rule to receive the maximum benefit from this transformative technology.” 

1upHealth is on a mission to turn data into information that will help patients live longer, healthier lives. The fast-growing company recently raised $25 million in Series B funding. As Gartner put it, “1upHealth’s FHIR API Platform is the first true implementation of the ONC’s intent for healthcare interoperability.” 1upHealth’s customer portfolio includes industry giants like Aetna and Cigna. The company has spent the past year rapidly onboarding customers in advance of CMS interoperability rule requirements and 100% of its health plan customers have met the FHIR API patient access rule deadline, which gives patients access and the ability to share claims, encounter, clinical, and formulary data. Since its inception in 2017, the company has collected ten awards, including the security phase of the HHS Secure FHIR Server Challenge.

About 1upHealth

1upHealth is the leading FHIR platform that connects an ecosystem of payers, providers, patients, life sciences and app developers within a trusted interoperability network. Unlike legacy enterprise companies, 1upHealth was created and built with the modern healthcare infrastructure in mind. The 1upFHIR platform is serverless with cloud-native applications that transform data at enterprise scale with greater ease and simplicity to improve patient outcomes, drive population-level analytics and enable medical innovation. Founded in 2017, the company is connected to more than 10,000 clinical endpoints with best-in-class FHIR APIs. Gartner designated 1upHealth a “Cool Vendor in Healthcare Interoperability” for its FHIR platform.