Aneesh Chopra, the first chief technology officer of the United States, and Glen Tullman, former CEO of Allscripts, have joined Box as special advisors for the company’s healthcare and life sciences practice, according to a company press release.
Chopra and Tullman will assist Box in deepening its expertise in the healthcare industry and supporting the growing number of hospitals, health insurance firms and medical and pharmaceutical companies on its platform.
Based in Los Altos, Calif., Box seeks to make businesses of all sizes more productive, competitive, and powerful by connecting people and their most important information.
“Healthcare 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, healthcare and regulatory reform will be instrumental to our success in this space.”
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In the past year, sales in healthcare and life sciences has grown six-fold, with new customers like MD Anderson Cancer Center, St. Joseph Health, UnityPoint Health, Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI) and Mount Sinai Health System, according to Box.
“We have made great progress digitizing healthcare, opening up new data sources and shifting the payment incentives in healthcare to reward value over volume,” said Chopra, who is co-founder of the data analytics startup, Hunch Analytics and a former United States chief technology officer under President Barack Obama. “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.”
Tullman, who serves as a managing partner for 7Wire Ventures, said, “I am excited to be working with Box as they continue to build out their healthcare and life sciences practice. Box is a great example of a highly successful cloud-based service that is used by large and small businesses alike for next generation collaboration. It’s not enough to put existing healthcare IT solutions into the cloud, we need solutions that will help providers re-engineer their workflow processes and make data sharing in healthcare easier and more user intuitive.”
Tullman is one of the early pioneers of the healthcare IT industry, building Allscripts, a leading global provider of electronic health records. He took the company public in 1999 and grew the company from $30 million in 1997 to $1.4 billion in 2012.
Chopra is a long-time healthcare industry veteran spending many years at The Advisory Board Company, a global and research consulting firm for hospitals, before moving into politics. As a former chief technology officer for the United States appointed by Obama, Chopra brings policy knowledge on health IT and government sponsored interoperability initiatives.
