A new payer-led patient information exchange in California is getting ready to hit the ground running.

The California Integrated Data Exchange or Cal INDEX, a statewide patient data exchange service created by Blue Shield of California and WellPoint-owned Anthem Blue Cross, has rounded out its leadership team with a CFO, CTO and chief privacy officer.

In September, Cal INDEX hired its CEO, David Watson, until recently the global VP of healthcare strategy at enterprise IT giant Oracle Corporation and also a former COO at payer-provider technology firm Mede Analytics and CTO at Kaiser Permanente in the early 2000s.

Now Cal INDEX has found the rest of its management team.

Cal INDEX has hired as CTO a former colleague of Watson’s, John Lee, who worked as healthcare product development vice president at Oracle and as engineering VP and later CTO at MedeAnalytics, his time overlapping with Watson’s at both companies.

For CFO, Greg LeClaire has been hired from Aetna’s Healthagen division, where he also worked as CFO at three subsidiary companies, Medicity, HDMS and Population Health IT.

Cal INDEX has also hired Andrea Leeb, a registered nurse and attorney, to serve as chief privacy officer, a position of heightened significance given public concern over personal health information and data breaches. Leeb was most recently assistant managing counsel at Los Angeles Care Health Plan, the nation’s largest publicly-operated health plan, and formerly worked as senior director of global privacy risk at McKesson and chief privacy officer for UnitedHealth Group’s publicly-funded health plans.

Cal INDEX is also hiring a communications vice president, Doug Hart, who was most recently VP of marketing and corporate communications for Deloitte’s ConvergeHEALTH

Blue Shield of California and Anthem Blue Cross have invested a combined $80 million to start Cal INDEX, modeling after a public utility and dubbing it a “next generation” health information exchange service for providers, payers and patients, offering California physicians, nurses and hospitals “a unified statewide source of integrated patient information.” 

The technology platform is set to be operational by year’s end and will be open to any health data contributor, including insurers beyond Blue Shield and Anthem and providers beyond their networks. The service will connect claims and EHR data to create comprehensive, longitudinal patient records that participating providers can access through a portal that “works with most major electronic medical record systems” and displays data, alerts and analytics, along with basic care management tools. The data will also be put to use for public health research (after being de-identified).

The new executive team is well-rounded and ready to turn that vision into reality, said Watson. “I am confident that each of them has the qualifications and track record, as well as the passion and commitment, to help lead this next-generation health data exchange for California residents.”

Set up as an independent nonprofit, Cal INDEX is going to use the $80 million seed funding to cover costs for three years and onboard about 30 large provider organizations; after that participating providers and insurers will be asked to contribute through subscription fees.

The technical work of linking providers and plans across the state could be a large and challenging undertaking, with many hospitals and physicians struggling themselves to connect digital health record software, sometimes within the same parent organization. But the exchange’s rewards could be significant in terms of reducing duplication, improving the patient experience and simplifying clinician’s workflows.