HIStalk Interviews Ajay Kapare, President, Ellkay

Ajay Kapare, MBA is president and chief strategy officer of Ellkay.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been with Ellkay for six and a half years. Ellkay is an interoperability solution provider company. We are in five segments of healthcare.

We are in ambulatory, where we do data migration, conversion, and clinical and financial archiving. We are also in hospitals, where we are an enterprise data management partner. We primarily decommission legacy applications. We provide an archive solution. We offer an interoperability solution called LKOpera to health systems. We are also in the lab segment, which is where we started our business, where we primarily do LIS to EMR integration and also order and result portals. LKOrbit is our lab platform. Close to 700 clinical labs use Ellkay.  Our fourth segment is providing interoperability for vendors. We do any integration that is needed with an EMR, getting the data out of the EMR or pushing the data into the EMR. We’ve been growing in this segment strongly. Finally, we offer an interoperability solution and clinical data exchange solution for the payer market.

We have been growing consistently the last six years and we have nearly 700 employees globally. In today’s market, few companies can say that they have been growing consistently year over year. Our customers and employees are our biggest assets. Customer-first and employee-first have always been our focus.

What business impact have you seen from TEFCA and QHINs?

We are proud to be participating in TEFCA through our work with CommonWell and achieving QHIN designation for the CommonWell 2.0 platform. TEFCA provides guidance for the secure exchange of health information regardless of the location of care. While organizations have been working to achieve this mission independently of each other for quite some time, this framework gives us all a goal to strive for. CommonWell, with Ellkay’s technology, is one of the seven QHINs.

What interoperability requests do you get most often?

More than 70% of hospitals are struggling financially. We are working with those that want to improve their efficiency and reduce costs, working with our interop solutions, LKOpera, or even decommissioning legacy applications that are sitting out there. We give them great ROI in having all that data for the informatics people and clinicians to use through LKArchive.

We see a lot of interest in FHIR. Hospitals, health plans, and vendors are all adopting FHIR within their interoperability arms. With this adoption, we also see the ease of data connectivity and exchange based on standards-based formats that allow the organization to communicate more efficiently and effectively. At Ellkay, we are continually evolving ahead of the industry to be able to accommodate all these standard methodologies and to integrate systems. We are assisting many organizations with transforming data to FHIR resources if that is not configured within their own system.

We feel strongly about our work with CommonWell and implementing the core functionality to their new platform, which is in production, including TEFCA, and all the work around that.

Has AI changed the demand for interoperability or given the company more capability?

The term AI is used everywhere. In the last few years, almost $5 billion in funding has been given to digital startups that are mostly focused on AI. There has been some confusion around exactly what AI is. Even someone who is doing screen scraping will call that AI.

As things have changed for us at Ellkay, we have been working as a true data management partner. Our experience of 20-plus years with healthcare data and data sources is unparalleled. We have almost 60,000 interfaces with different systems throughout the healthcare IT ecosystem.

As healthcare AI initiatives rely heavily on quality data, Ellkay has been laying this foundation for years. You can’t offer new AI technology without good access to quality data. We provide data integrity and data quality expertise to our client partners. We’re also helping them identify the best value-add use cases for the data and guiding them through the noise as they embark on their AI/ML journeys.

How does Ellkay address marketing differently given your strong background in it?

Marketing has always been my first love. Ellkay does strategic marketing. We truly believe that passion, action, and noble intention creates progress. We have never been a very aggressive marketer. We have always been a strategic marketer.

Our virtual user group meeting is August 13 to August 15. Last year we had more than 1,000 attendees — our strategic partners, people from the industry, and prospects. We opened it up to everyone. We had more than 50 speakers. The focus wasn’t Ellkay products, but rather what the trends are in the industry and what changes are happening. Post Meaningful Use and post COVID, what new challenges are health systems, the clinical lab, the ambulatory market, health plans, and payers going through? What challenges are vendors or vendor partners going through? We bring speakers who focus on those areas. When we’re at trade shows, you will see in our booth that our people are always happy. They smile and genuinely want to help.

We can do a great job if there is a market problem that we can solve as a true strategic partner, as we listen more and do focus groups. Our marketing is our voice. It tells the world who we are and what we believe in. It works well and resonates with people. We are true to the core, and whatever we say, we actually mean it.

How do you value collaboration and personal industry relationships?

Our core competencies as a company have always been innovation, execution, agility, and relationships. Relationships play an important role for us. You have to listen to your customers. You have to understand their needs and challenges. When I’m meeting a CIO, a lab director, or even a vendor CTO, I listen to understand their challenges. As a company, we take a customer-first approach and help solve their problems.

We like to keep our head down, ignore the noise around us, stay focused, and keep on doing the same things again and again, repeating the same formula. It’s a process. It’s a journey. Focusing on the things that we can do well has always paid off for us.

What are the most important factors for the company over the next few years?

We want to be a trusted enterprise data partner. We want to be the true partner who can help organizations with their problems, whether it’s a new EMR journey, challenges within their interop needs, or challenges within their lab network. We want to be that true partner, and I’m going to keep repeating this, true enterprise data management partner.

Our future has always been meeting our clients where they are, but also going where they want us to go with them. We will continue to support our client partners by helping them manage their data needs and interop needs, but also by being a thought leader and consultative partner.

A lot of health systems want to do a rationalization exercise around applications that are sitting out there on vulnerable servers. We can do the entire process: true archiving data integrity and analytics based on the type of data and what operational, financial, or clinical needs make sense. Healthcare data is powerful and we should be doing more with it as an industry.

We have some good partners helping us. We are also working towards different growth. We’re looking at international growth. We are looking at what we can do on the data and life sciences side. It’s an exciting time to be at Ellkay.