“Why I Joined 1UpHealth?” Former National Coordinator – Dr. Don Rucker. MD

Making health care affordable for patients and efficient for providers has long been a goal of healthcare, and of my own personal and professional journey.                          

While working in the emergency department, I found many clinicians – doctors and nurses alike – were experiencing scutwork; work that should have been managed using technology, which many other industries were beginning to build out. But health technology of the time did not reflect the promise of using data and tech tools to improve care or efficiencies. We still have work to operationally integrate clinical and financial data and make this information fully computable.

I began my career helping build a largely standalone EMR, progressed to integration designing and implementing enterprise computerized physician order entry but at the time, these were even known to be halfway steps. Recently, as the leader in health, IT policy at HHS in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), I had the chance to implement the 21st Century Cures Act working with my ONC colleagues to build the legal framework for patients to get actionable control of their data. 

In my role at ONC, I was able to appreciate the unique promise of the FHIR standard to achieve many of the clinical goals which have been so elusive. 

And that’s why the opportunity to help Ricky Sahu and the 1upHealth team is so exciting to me. In its short history, 1upHealth is already helping re-imagine healthcare through its efforts to make health information truly computable. 1up’s scalable, serverless FHIR software and services provide a unique platform for payers, providers, and app developers to blend modern computing with clinical data at full scale.  

1upHealth is showing that FHIR at scale can be used to connect siloed clinical and claims legacy data into conformed and computable data. Health plans, providers, and pharmaceutical companies are already leveraging this unified data to deploy cloud-native analytics to improve healthcare operations, compute predictive and actionable analytics, and personalize health for patients.  

1upHealth is connecting a network of payers, providers, and patients while managing access through its award-winning security and data governance solutions. 

I am excited about the opportunity ahead, not just for me or 1upHealth, but for the patients and providers who will ultimately benefit from the foundation we are building.