With Eye on QHIN Status, Health Gorilla Adds Interoperability Experts

Health Gorilla, a company seeking to become a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, has beefed up its executive team by hiring Dave Cassel, former executive director of Carequality, as well as Steven Lane, M.D., M.P.H., former clinical informatics director at California-based Sutter Health.

The Mountain View, California-based company announced its intent to seek QHIN status in 2021. It says its “flexible interoperability platform was built to execute the goals of the 21st Century Cures Act Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) and provides connections between healthcare providers, health plans, public health agencies, and individuals. In June 2020, Health Gorilla implemented what it calls the first “TEFCA-inspired HIE” in Puerto Rico. Today, Health Gorilla acts as the single-source provider of health information exchange for the Puerto Rico Department of Health and operates as the HIE connecting payers, labs, providers, patients, and public health officials.

The company also said it would begin incorporating social determinants of health (SDOH) data into its Health Interoperability Platform through a collaboration with LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

In March 2022, the company announced it had raised $50 million in series C funding to accelerate product development, market expansion, and company-wide talent acquisition efforts.

Cassel brings more than 20 years of experience in healthcare technology and has developed a reputation as a leader in national health information exchange. Most recently, Cassel was the president and COO of Safe Health Systems, a connected diagnostics platform operating in partnership with Mayo Clinic. Before Safe, Cassel served as the executive director of the Carequality interoperability initiative for six years. Prior to Carequality, he spent 17 years at Epic Systems, where he led implementation and support for the Care Everywhere health information exchange application.

In his new role as senior vice president of customer success and operations, Cassel will lead Health Gorilla's customer implementation, operations, and success teams, and will also be responsible for Health Gorilla's strategy in its pursuit of a QHIN designation. The application period officially opens Oct. 3.

"When I left Carequality a year ago, I knew a tremendous amount of work still needed to be done to create true national interoperability, " said Cassel in a statement. "Over the last few years, Health Gorilla has emerged as a market leader in patient data retrieval, and I'm excited to see what we're able to accomplish together."

Lane recently joined the company as chief medical officer. The company said he would spearhead government collaborations, innovative partnerships, and accelerate its strategy to support the adoption of TEFCA nationwide.

Lane is chairman of the Carequality Steering Committee and a member of the board of directors of The Sequoia Project, TEFCA’s Recognized Coordinating Entity designated by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). He also serves as a member of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) for the Department of Health and Human Services, the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Interoperability & HIE Committee, and the Da Vinci Project Clinical Advisory Council.

He has worked in clinical informatics for over 30 years, most recently as the clinical informatics director of privacy, information security, and interoperability at Sutter Health, and has cared for patients as a primary care family physician for more than 35 years.

"The healthcare industry’s future is reliant on broader access to standardized, actionable data,” said Lane, in a statement. “I am very excited to see TEFCA implemented and to join Health Gorilla in their journey to serve as one of the first Qualified Health Information Networks. They are well positioned to onboard a broad range of healthcare stakeholders to the next generation national health data exchange framework.”