Cloud storage firm Box Inc. on Monday announced the addition of Aneesh Chopra, the first chief technology officer of the United States, and Glen Tullman, former CEO of electronic health record pioneer Allscripts, as special advisers to the company’s growing health care practice.
The announcement comes as revenue from the company’s health care and life sciences business continues to climb, increasing six-fold during the past year, during which Box has signed on at least five major clients, including St. Joseph Health and Mount Sinai Health System.
“Health care is Box’s fastest-growing vertical, and it’s clear that there’s a remarkable opportunity to improve the way information is captured, managed and shared between doctors, researchers, patients and institutions,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “We’re excited to work with Aneesh and Glen, whose years of experience working at the intersection of technology, health care and regulatory reform will be instrumental to our success in this space.”
Since leaving the White House in 2012, Chopra has served as a health care strategy adviser to Apigee Corp., a San Jose, Calif.-based company that specializes in application programming interfaces and big data, and as co-founder of Hunch Analytics, an Arlington, Va.-based startup that specializes in big data analytics.
In 2012, Chopra launched a bid for the lieutenant governorship of Virginia, but lost to then-State Sen. Ralph Northam.
“We have made great progress digitizing health care, opening up new data sources and shifting the payment incentives in healthcare to reward value over volume,” Chopra said in a statement. “I see great possibilities for services like Box, which already have mass consumer and enterprise adoption, to usher in much-needed innovative and cost-effective approaches for data sharing between providers, payers and patients.”
Box also announced it has integrated its platform with CareCloud, a cloud-based electronic health record with 7 million users. With this new integration, physicians using CareCloud can transfer patient records to Box, where patients can securely download them or transfer them to other doctors. According to Box, this gives patients with multiple providers the ability to download and aggregate all of their records in one place rather than accessing their records on multiple portals attached to EHRs in different practices and hospitals.
Since gaining compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, in April 2013, Box has experienced tremendous growth in the health care vertical. New health care customers during the past year include MD Anderson Cancer Center, St. Joseph Health, Mount Sinai Health System, BRI, Palomar Health, University of Mississippi Medical Center, UnityPoint Health, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, AMN Healthcare Service, Inc and ZirMed.
