We recently sat down with Interop Hero, Andrei Zudin, Co-founder and CTO of Health Gorilla to discuss how the company has evolved since its inception, as well as the milestones Andrei is most proud of.

Through his nomination, we learned Andrei and his team focus on solving complex health data integration and exchanges using FHIR-based clinical APIs. Under Andrei’s technical leadership, Health Gorilla has developed industry leading interoperability solutions that allow the entire health care ecosystem — patients, payers, providers, digital health solutions, and labs — to seamlessly share health data and aggregate each patient’s clinical history in one place.

Andrei states that today Health Gorilla is one of the leading Health Information Networks (HIN) in the United States and has implemented the first state-wide HIN in Puerto Rico in collaboration with the Puerto Rico Department of Health.

In 2014, Health Gorilla was originally established as a marketplace and solution for diagnostic vendors, like labs and imaging centers. Since then, the company has evolved quite significantly to enter the market of community-based exchange. Through connections with Carequality, CommonWell Health Alliance and eHealth Exchange, they began building a national FHIR-based platform to support secure data exchanges.

Once the company successfully expanded, they realized their original mission of wanting to be a universal source of truth for clinical data no longer represented their values that they now bring to the healthcare community. Today, their mission is to connect everyone everywhere with actionable health data to improve outcomes and reduce inefficiencies.

On a personal note, it’s exciting for Andrei to see how health care delivers changes once providers have access to more patient clinical data — he says it’s what keeps the company going.

One major milestone he’s most proud of is being selected and delivering health information exchange services in Puerto Rico. The Department of Health chose Health Gorilla to build their HIE, which went live in 2020. That timing is the reason their initial focus was on Covid cases, hospitalization rates, etc. They did this work by aggregating all diagnostic tests on the island and reporting positive cases to the epidemiology agency.

Today, he says the Puerto Rico HIE connects almost 3 million residents and allows the sharing of secure, electronic clinical data between healthcare providers across more than 400 care sites and 4,500 providers on the island. It’s a big success story he’s very passionate about.

Looking to the future, Andrei would like to see Health Gorilla be the single source of truth for the healthcare community. He views the healthcare system as the key to unlocking potential for data to solve problems.

At the end of the day, it’s a lot of fun, he says. Seeing all the positive results and success among providers, payers and patients is what keeps Andrei and his team focused on their goals.

If you’re interested in learning more about Health Gorilla or would like to meet with Andrei in-person, they will be at HLTH 2022 from November 13 through November 16 showcasing their interoperability services. Thank you to Andrei Zudin of Health Gorilla for sharing his experience and perspective with us!

Learn more about the Interoperability Hero Initiative and check out our third class of Interoperability Heroes.

This post was contributed by Alyssa Foggia-Hamm.