Innovaccer’s John Gurnett on how data can help healthcare

John Gurnett, GM for UK & Europe at Innovaccer, explores the potential for data to help healthcare reduce costs & unleash digital transformation

John Gurnett is the General Manager UK and Europe at Innovaccer, a global healthcare technology company with a mission to connect and curate the world’s healthcare information to accelerate innovation and digital transformation.

“I find healthcare to be a fluid and ever-changing industry, more than any other I have worked in,” he says. “When I started in healthcare twenty years ago, technology was just a ‘nice to have’—today, most people accept that you can’t provide or improve healthcare without it.”

Innovaccer’s cloud-based Data Activation Platform acquires, curates, and aggregates healthcare data to make it accessible and useful to improve clinical, financial, and operational outcomes.The platform unifies patient data across systems and care settings, empowering healthcare organisations to develop scalable and future-ready applications. Innovaccer’s solutions have been deployed across 1,600 care settings, enabling over 96,000 individual care providers to transform care delivery for more than 39m people while generating £800m in cumulative cost savings; and to work collaboratively with other stakeholders across the health and social care continuum.

Innovaccer was rated the #1 Data and Analytics Platform by KLAS, a leading research organisation that recognises technology and service companies in its highly regarded yearly reports for excellence in improving healthcare. In addition, they received a #1 rating for population health technology platform from Black Book—a research organisation that bases its conclusions solely on client experience scores.

In his role, Gurnett is responsible for communicating the value of Innovaccer’s solutions while leading business and customer success. Innovaccer leads healthcare transformation across the USA through its Health Cloud and offers a range of customised solutions to improve population health management, strengthen patient experience, reduce care costs and bolster clinician support.

“As General Manager, I oversee implementation across care facilities in the UK, and also invest my time in curating tailor-made solutions to better address the specific needs of healthcare providers here,” says Gurnett.

Gurnett’s career did not start in healthcare. He started his career as a management consultant at REL Consultancy, then as an equity partner at Deloitte.

Innovaccer's market entry: helping organisations improve care and reduce costs

After being heavily involved in the successful transformation of healthcare systems in the USA market, Innovaccer is expanding internationally to help organisations accelerate their healthcare innovation and digital transformation.

“Recently, the NHS announced that by 2025 it expects health and social care organisations to have digital maturity,” said Gurnett. “This confirms the digital transformation wave that policymakers and healthcare leaders recognise as necessary for health and social care systems. Innovaccer’s proven technology will help NHS and related healthcare stakeholders accelerate their transformation and add value to healthcare.”

The rise of digital health spotlighted the potential for great advancement, but as has happened in so many other infotech industries, healthcare application vendors have unintentionally created an environment where their solutions lack the need and benefit of true interoperability.

“They have in effect built walled gardens and now, walled clouds which we refer to as data silos,” said Gurnett. In order to improve care and reduce care costs, healthcare organisations need to ingest and smartly consolidate this fragmented data into unified patient records that enable advanced analytics, integrated workflows, insights at the point of care, and patient-centred holistic care—all of which are essential to improving health and financial outcomes.

“This is why Innovaccer took a different approach from the beginning,” Gurnett explained. “The Innovaccer Health Cloud goes beyond mere interoperability or connectivity, and ushers in an open industry ecosystem based on a unique, patient-centric data model that seals healthcare’s fractures to bring healthcare data and stakeholders together.”

“The move to the UK market was an obvious choice, as digitally-enabled care is expected to go mainstream across the NHS in England—advancing to full digitalisation within the next few years. The NHS is now transitioning to integrated care systems, which are very similar in nature to what we see in the USA and other countries; and the same type of enablement we’ve brought organisations successfully transforming in the USA.”

In order to deliver healthcare effectively, the NHS has embraced integrated care systems (ICSs)—as opposed to separate organisations in primary, secondary, and tertiary care and out into social care. Gurnett sees ICSs as key drivers in helping unify patient data across the care continuum.

“Innovaccer enables care teams to make decisions based on that data wherever they sit, whether they're in a GP practice, or a hospital, or an emergency department, or a volunteer in a food bank—gaining the benefits of contextualised data and a complete 360-degree view of the patient.”

Innovaccer unleashes the potential of data and accelerates digital transformation in healthcare

Troves of patient data are trapped in proprietary silos, disconnected from one system to the next. Gurnett wants to “tear down the data walls,” and bring this valuable information together, using a scalable cloud platform that unlocks the power of data. Moreover, it provides a basis for new digital services and solutions to be rapidly built with interoperability that’s intrinsic to the solution - not as an afterthought.

“Innovaccer has built the #1 healthcare data and analytics platform,” Gurnett said. “It unifies data into a single, longitudinal patient record; allowing customers to obtain a 360-degree view of their patients, drive down unnecessary costs, and improve care quality and cost-effectiveness. The Innovaccer Health Cloud is the first and only internet cloud fundamentally organised around the whole patient and a unified patient record - a single source of clinical and financial truth - to accelerate healthcare’s digital transformation and power the future of health.”

“While at Deloitte, I became fascinated with healthcare and the positive impact technology could have on it,” said Gurnett. “It was during this time that I developed my passion for healthcare, and the role of technology— for more effective delivery of care in terms of equity, outcomes and efficiency. Once I was hooked on healthcare, my career took an unexpected turn. I ended up getting involved in developing hospitals and clinics in the UK and Africa as a CIO for startups for quite a few years, which was again great fun. I then took all of these experiences back to the corporate world, spending the last 12 years, firstly at EMC, then Dell, leading complex healthcare sales in the UK and Europe.”

Later, Gurnett stepped back into consulting, as an executive and partner at IBM. There, he led the reinvigoration and redevelopment of their consulting and services business in the UK, focused on technology for new hospital builds. More recently, Gurnett started to look at the technology requirements for the up and coming Integrated Care Systems.