This Digital Health Startup Wants To Help Hospitals Make Sense Of All Their Tech

Forbes

22-05-2025

Innovaccer cofounder and CEO Abhinav Shashank
AI chatbots. Scribing tools. Insurance claims software. Electronic health records. Abhinav Shashank, cofounder and CEO of digital health startup Innovaccer, looks at all the new technology for healthcare providers and hospital systems and sees a big problem.
'Healthcare is the only place where technology came in and everything became more inefficient,' Shashank told Forbes. The problem is that large healthcare systems, which may have dozens of hospitals and thousands of physicians, often have lots of data and a variety of tools to manage it, but no easy way to put them all together. 'We really felt that in every part of our lives we have better technology,' he said. 'Our Uber driver has better technology than our doctors do.'
Today, Innovaccer unveiled its solution to that problem: A new software platform called Gravity that's designed to be a one-stop shop for all of those disparate tools and vast amounts of healthcare data. Now, instead of needing to log into different portals and websites over and over again, Gravity acts as a gateway to all of them — almost like a web browser, but for health tools and data instead of the internet.
Gravity has more than 400 pre-built connectors, which can pull in data from electronic health records, insurance claims and elsewhere. All that data is then accessible to a palette of AI tools, which are also available for doctors and hospital administrators to tap into from the same interface. Shashank hopes that Gravity will be 'the platform of all platforms,' helping hospitals avoid spending millions of dollars to integrate all their technology. The goal: better patient care, more efficient operations and better financial performance.
Gravity is currently in beta with two customers (which the company declined to identify), and Innovaccer is now in conversations with dozens more health systems about its potential, Shashank told Forbes. Innovaccer declined to disclose pricing for Gravity, but said it will be based on consumption.
The launch of the cloud-based product comes just four months after San Francisco-based Innovaccer raised a whopping $275 million funding round that valued the company, which makes a suite of software products for managing patient care and hospital operations, at $3.45 billion. That investment, which brought its total funding to $675 million, was the largest so far this year for a digital health startup. Its investors include industry heavyweights Kaiser Permanente, Banner Health and the venture arm of life sciences firm Danaher, as well as B Capital, Tiger Global and Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala.
Innovaccer isn't the only one to see the problem of data fragmentation across a proliferation of disparate tools in healthcare. Epic, the goliath of healthcare recordkeeping, and data-analytics giant Palantir, as well as a slew of venture-backed startups are tackling healthcare information overload too. Shashank figures that there's room for a company that's built from the ground up to fix this problem. The global market for pulling all these parts together ('healthcare interoperability solutions,' in the lingo) is forecast to rise from $4 billion last year to $14.5 billion in 2034, according to Precedence Research.
'What you need is this infrastructure that allows for these applications to coexist and exchange information,' Shashank said.
Shashank, 36 and a 2017 alum of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, grew up in Lucknow, a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and studied mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. He was fresh out of school and working in India for Ingersoll Rand, developing 'smart home' management software, when he had an idea for how similar technology could be used in a variety of different industries. 'I went to the CEO of Ingersoll Rand at that point and said, 'I want to start this company,'' Shashank said.
In winter 2014, with the blessing of Ingersoll Rand and $3.5 million in seed money, Shashank and his cofounders—Kanav Hasija (the company's chief product officer) and Sandeep Gupta (chief operations officer)—began building out Innovaccer's data analytics platform. They signed up Disney and NASA as early customers.
Then they started meeting healthcare organizations and saw just how fragmented patient data is. So after raising $20 million in 2016, they shuttered their existing business to focus exclusively on healthcare. 'That was not a fun board meeting,' Shashank recalled. 'The investors said, 'If you have conviction, we'll back you.' But I am sure they were panicked.'
It was a big risk, but it worked. To learn more about the U.S. healthcare system, Shashank and his cofounders lived at Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines, Iowa, for more than four months, and asked lots of questions. They saw firsthand how doctors needed a single point of access for healthcare data and the tools to analyze it. So they started building software to help, rolling out solutions for patient management, insurance support and physician insights.
Word of their work at Mercy soon spread from that Iowa hospital to others in Nebraska and Texas and California, despite Innovaccer having just a handful of salespeople. Innovaccer signed on Kaiser, Banner Health, Orlando Health and others as customers. Today, it claims to have more than 200 customers, including seven of the top 10 health systems.
Shashank's engineering background gives Innovaccer an advantage, said Murali Venkatesan, head of Danaher Ventures, which invested in the company in January. He explained that because Innovaccer incorporates information from Epic and other electronic health records systems, as well as data sets from the lab and elsewhere, it's a lot easier to search across it to find answers.
The company has lined up nearly $200 million in signed contracts on an annualized basis, and Shashank said he hopes to reach $230 million to $250 million by yearend. (The company declined to disclose actual revenue.) Shashank laughs when asked what he expected in the early days. 'My initial thought was if it gets to $10 million we would be kings,' he said.
Innovaccer started building out Gravity's AI-enabled software last year. As AI tools such as scribing apps for doctors proliferated, hospitals had become awash in different pieces of new technology that had trouble working together, Shashank explained. 'They were getting bombarded,' he said.
As Innovaccer builds out Gravity, Shashank hopes to integrate technology that ranges from prior authorization automation to post-surgery care. Rather than creating all these tools itself, the plan is to open up the platform to applications, including those created by the hospitals themselves.
Shashank figures that fixing healthcare's technology backbone will help with the overwhelming amount of waste in the U.S. healthcare system, with 2019 estimates published in JAMA putting it as high as $935 billion per year. 'I think as an industry we should hold AI accountable to get $1 trillion of waste reduced. It's doable,' he said.
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