Steve Yaskin: Leading the Race in Clinical Health Records Have you ever noticed when you go to the doctor’s office, they have stacks and piles of paper lying around? Historically, health records have all been on paper, and of course, this can get very disorganized. Healthcare is a basic part of any developed society,from records to doctor-patient relationships. That’s why Health Gorilla, a health records database startup was created to bring revolutionary technology to the world of healthcare. This company was created five years ago by CEO Steve Yaskin to create an entire clinical health care journey for every citizen in this country, so that patients, doctors, and hospitals nationwide can access one’s entire history all in one
the pursuit of happiness. Don’t accept the status quo.” (Yaskin).
place, provide better access to medical care, and therefore provide better outcomes for your health. Yaskin had many inspirations when it came to the basics of starting up this company. For one, he wanted to help the underserved, those who do not have equal access to medical coverage. Sometimes these people will have to travel many miles to find a doctor or don’t have the same access to highquality medical care that many of us enjoy. Even more so, Yaskin was originally from
a small country that had limited access to healthcare. Moldova had no healthcare, and besides being an immigrant, he was able to look at things in US medicine differently from others, and envision a better future for the country. Having a unique perspective from outside of the US gave him an opportunity to become empowered and emboldened to improve healthcare.
“I was inspired by the beauty of equal opportunity and
Yaskin was also sparked by the idea that if the company became more successful, increased healthcare would benefit the general population. Being from a similar background to populations that the company focuses on today, he has always been dedicated to providing whatever it takes to benefit as many people as possible. As Yaskin describes, “healthcare is the biggest industry in this country, with 4 trillion dollars spent on healthcare, accounting for about 20% of GDP. This number is much bigger than all other industries, and a lot of industries combined.” With this knowledge, Yaskin knew that he had to work to improve upon this industry in any way he could. He explains,
“It’s simple: saving lives... Even though we’re not doctors, we are
actually impacting many people.” He goes on to say, “Everyone at some point has a relative diagnosed with a disease. If, for example, it is cancer, the first thing doctors struggle with is fully understanding their disease. If we knew all the information possible about cancer, we probably would have eradicated it a while ago. However, unfortunately, we don’t know even five to ten percent of associated events that happened during cancer disease progression and that’s what we do on a daily basis” (Yaskin).
Health Gorilla now focuses on painting a complete picture of a person’s health, both from clinical and diagnostic
perspectives. An
interesting factor that goes into the company’s process of data collection is something called social determinants of health. These are interesting factors that don’t seem to have any relevance on your health, but in reality, impact how long you live and how long you stay healthy. “These include various social factors: do you have a car, do you own a house, do you have siblings, and is your sibling more social than you. We combine this with the actual clinical and diagnostic history, and present a much more interesting picture of health, so we can better manage, or better, so we can better look at it” (Yaskin). This idea of social determinants
of health has largely been overlooked by previous healthcare records until recently when Health Gorilla uncovered the true importance of it. This further works to improve health records, and the health of different populations. Yaskin had been working directly with doctors. “I was working for a pharmaceutical company, several of them actually, and I learned a lot about the importance of data in providing treatments, also, I learned a lot about access to care, and how care is not proportionally provided to citizens living in cities, versus rural areas.” (Yaskin) He created a system of collective amounts of data for people having an adverse or normal
reaction to certain medications. He then became a co-founder of a company named Elite Medical Center, a medical facility that administered primary care for young adults and geriatric patients. From this, he learned a lot about the importance of data in providing treatments, access to care, making him realize that healthcare is not proportionally provided to citizens living in cities, versus rural areas. Furthermore, Yaskin spent 20 years studying theoretical physics and later earned his master’s degree. One may ask how can Physics be applied to the medical field. Yaskin explains, Physics gave me discipline for being in science for that long,
it also created a passion for technology, but more importantly, being in Physics, which is the science of nature, I learned how to take scientific discoveries and innovation and apply them to real life. With what I have at my disposal to fix this problem, I think about what I need to create something new, do I need to innovate, how do I use technology effectively, and how do I use basic laws of physics to impact change. It’s very interesting what you can build. Having this knowledge about the world, and how nature works, and the basic laws of physics will take you a lot further. In other words, Physics allowed him to use basic laws of the world around us to impact change, and use his knowledge to create something great. He
was now inspired to implement new, effective technology which would improve healthcare records for the whole nation. An article by VentureBeat explains thoroughly the goals and implementations of Health Gorilla to this day: Founded in 2014 by Steve Yaskin, Andrei Zudin, and former Stanford Healthcare business development executive Sergio Wagner, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Health Gorilla, which was originally founded as a marketplace for labs, aims to provide a secure and interoperable product that enables payers, providers, and digital health solutions to share health data and aggregate each patient’s clinical history in one place…. Health Gorilla osten-
sibly makes it easier for providers to pull a patient’s information from a clinical records system. (Wiggers) The company has been provided to patients and doctors all over the nation, and even in other countries, too. Because of its improvements in medical records, it continues to help millions of people to this day. Before even starting up the company, Yaskin was aware that a lot of money is continuously being wasted on unnecessary medical care. With limited data between doctors, hospitals, ambulances, EMTs, nursing homes, labs, a big ecosystem of providers are disconnected from the lack of data between them. Doctors repeat unnecessary medical procedures, tests, diagnostics, and this creates a
really big waste of money, resources, and electronic systems. This is what’s called physician burnout, where doctors, instead of treating parents, spend more time working on their computers. Steve Yaskin explains “I’m very happy that my company is at the bleeding edge of making technology a lot easier for doctors and patients, and actually improving outcomes, and sometimes, even saving lives.” Health care affects all of us, we’re all patients, and everyone in this country will become a patient at some point, even doctors. Healthcare touches on so many aspects of all of our lives, from privacy to the ability to access data, equity, equality, and especially in providing high-quality medical
services. Steve Yaskin acknowledged this and reached further and now works with big organizations including the CDC, under which he works with Obama, Trump, and now Biden’s administration, the human health services in specific. Yaskin explains, “I’m happy to say we contributed a lot to the Cure’s act, which the government legislature passed a couple of years ago. They’re still passing amendments, which my company Health Gorilla, takes a very active role in, providing feedback, and a lot of things we ask them to do, actually find themselves in the legislature.” This company has even spread its influence so far as Latin American countries, such as Puerto Rico, to help the country in a state right after natural disasters, when severely impacted with storms and hurricanes. Health Gorilla takes an active role in providing equal access to health care that doctors must effectively administer care for all the people on the Island. “We’re making a really big change there.” Yaskin has taken his knowledge, and inspiration to create
something great. Success is not always easy to accomplish as an entrepreneur. For this reason, it’s important to have a specific motivation or smething to keep you going. In an article pu blished by Entrepreneur, different people are shown and descriptions about what inspired them to keep going. One of those is Chieh Huang, CEO of Boxed: an online Grocery Store website. He explains, “There are a lot of people counting on us to make the right decisions to make sure that we do well, so they can put food on the table and that inspires me.” This is one reason why Health Gorilla is also very successful to this day. The motivation to help people all around the world helped the company’s staff members battle the obstacles and do whatever it took to become successful. The next step was unpredicted, with the strike of Covid-19. Interestingly enough, the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 accelerated things for the company. In the first six months of the pandemic, there were a lot of unknowns: numbers of cases, symptoms,
and whether medications prescribed to patients worked or not. Additionally, their database did not identify who was tested for COVID, but they were motivated right away to start working with the government, and the CDC, to start getting things under control and compile data on COVID testing. However, once the company did start developing this database, testing took a lot more time than expected. The company had started working on the vaccination, an active work in progress to this day. Data is being collected about who gets vaccinated and when, and any symptoms they might encounter. The data is then collected nationally and even further into Latin American countries like Mexico and Brazil. To this day, since the pandemic hit, the company is better equipped to provide this data, research various studies about future pandemics, and be better prepared, should another pandemic come. In the future, Health Gorilla and its staff want to work towards making healthcare equally accessible, and for healthcare to
be of high quality to the entire population. Yaskin explains how they strongly believe that efficient and accessible health care is a basic human right, a commodity, and it should be available to everyone. Saving lives has always been an inspiration behind Health Gorilla and continues to be. Even though the staff members are not actual doctors, they save lives and impact people because of their effective technology. Yaskin continues to be an inspiration, leading the way in the era of digital healthcare. He strives to continue branching out the influence of Health Gorilla, helping as many people as possible.
“The more patients we can help, and the more doctors we can empower to provide better health, and a wider access to a broader population, regardless of their social state, income, and population like where they live, is our goal and we will continue to do that” (Yaskin).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Evelyn Yaskin is a Design student at a Freestyle Academy of Communication Arts and Technology, and a junior at Mountain View High School. She is a passionate leader in her Jewish youth group. She spends her free time playing tennis, and is the captain of her high school team. She participates in clubs including Model UN and started the Jewish Student Union club during her sophmore year. Evelyn loves Design and hopes to pursue it later on in college. She looks forward to her senior year and loves Freestyle so far.