LAS VEGAS — If Ascendiun CEO Paul Markovich could eliminate one buzzword from the healthcare dictionary, it would be “interoperability.”
Why? Because, he said, the concept doesn’t represent the actual goal that healthcare organizations should be striving for. He and his organization, which is the parent company of Blue Shield of California, are instead pushing for the industry writ large to embrace a comprehensive digital health record for every patient.
For example, a hospital sending a lengthy patient record to a physician doesn’t achieve much on its own in improving patient care and empowering them on their own health. Interoperability for its own sake, he said, is a “journey without a destination.”
“It drives me crazy that for better part of two decades we keep celebrating the fact that we’re sharing more information,” he said, “as if I email a PDF of 70 pages from a hospital to a physician or from one position to another position, we’re actually accomplishing something.”
Markovich spoke during a keynote session at AHIP 2026 on Wednesday about his and his organization’s ambitions around digital health records, an endeavor that is actively underway at Blue Shield. In California, a state law requires that providers share data with health insurers, which has enabled the company to leap forward on digital health records.
As it stands today, Blue Shield members can log into their member app and see their complete medical record in digital form, as well as share it will loved ones or other caregivers who may need that information, Markovich said.
He offered several examples of how this could work in practice. For instance, he met a woman who had recently moved across multiple states and was struggling to secure vaccine records to enroll her child in school. The previous pediatricians said they had to send the data via fax, but the fax cut off without the full details.
It ultimately took her several months to get the data necessary for enrollment, Markovich said.
“The goal is not interoperability, the goal is not that one electronic medical record system can share information with another electronic medical record system,” he said. “The goal is for every single American to have a comprehensive view of their entire digital history and have it be in a real-time, usable format that can be used by their treating clinician and anyone else, including their health plan, to facilitate their care.”
It’s with this mind for innovation that Ascendiun was formed to house Blue Shield and its sister company, Stellarus. Stellarus aims to build out the technological infrastructure necessary to advance critical healthcare priorities, including the digital health record.
Markovich said that, for example, when Blue Shield chose to launch its Pharmacy Care Reimagined model, which “unbundles” pharmacy benefit management services across multiple vendors instead of one central partner, it cost the insurer close to $100 million to build the administrative capabilities necessary for that program.
Through Stellarus, the team is aiming to support that work and also engage with other insurers, particularly other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, to drive innovation.
“We created Stellarus to say, ‘If we can put these capabilities together, we can share in the talks with creating them with other plans, particularly other Blue plans’ … then we can make it, we can accelerate the development of that technology,” Markovich said.
Since its launch, Stellarus has signed on additional plan partners, including Blues insurers in Kansas and Hawaii, he said.
Markovich did acknowledge that, at present, a relatively small number of Blue Shield members are making use of the digital health record, estimating that about 15% of people are accessing the tool. However, he said that those who do are really embracing the tech.
And as companies like Stellarus unlock the full potential of these records, Markovich expects that utilization to grow.
In addition, with a midterm election on the horizon and a potentially new makeup in Congress beginning next year, Markovich said the team is set for a full court press to garner national momentum with lawmakers on digital health records. California’s law enables Blue Shield to do quite a lot, but really growing these records requires a larger scale.
“We have been for a couple of years, but we’re going to take another run at it, probably in the new Congress in the first quarter of this coming year,” he said.
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