LAS VEGAS — If Ascendiun CEO Paul Markovich could remove one buzzword from the healthcare dictionary, it would be “interoperability.”
why? That’s because the concept doesn’t represent the actual goals healthcare organizations should aim for, he said. He and his organization, the parent company of Blue Shield of California, are instead calling on the entire industry to embrace comprehensive digital health records for every patient.
For example, if a hospital sends a long patient record to a physician, it will not in itself improve patient care and have a significant impact on the patient’s own health management. He said interoperability itself is a “journey without a destination.”
“It’s crazy to me that for the better part of 20 years we continue to celebrate the fact that we’re sharing more information. It’s like emailing a 70-page PDF from a hospital to a doctor or from one position to another,” he said.
Markovic spoke Wednesday during a keynote session at AHIP 2026 about his and his organization’s ambitions for digital health records, which are actively underway at Blue Shield. In California, state law requires health care providers to share data with health insurance companies, allowing the company to make significant advances in digital health records.
Currently, Blue Shield members can log into the membership app to view their complete medical records in digital format and share that information with loved ones or other caregivers who may need it, Markovich said.
He gave some examples of how this works in practice. For example, he met a woman who had recently moved across multiple states and was having trouble securing vaccination records to enroll her child in school. My previous pediatrician said I needed to fax the data, but the fax cut out without giving me the full details.
Markovic said it ultimately took several months to obtain the data needed for registration.
“The goal is not interoperability, and the goal is not to allow one electronic health records system to share information with another electronic health records system,” he said. “The goal is for every American to have a comprehensive view of their entire digital history and put it in a usable format in real time that can be used by treating clinicians and anyone else to facilitate treatment, including health plans.”
Ascendiun was created to house Blue Shield and its sister company Stellarus. Stellarus aims to build the technology infrastructure needed to advance important healthcare priorities such as digital health records.
Markovich said, for example, when Blue Shield chose to launch a Pharmacy Care Reimagined model that “unbundled” pharmacy benefit management services to multiple vendors rather than one central partner, it cost the insurer nearly $100 million to build the management capabilities needed for that program.
The team aims to support that effort through Stellarus and drive innovation in collaboration with other insurers, especially other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans.
“We created Stellarus to say, ‘If we can integrate these capabilities, we can join the discussion with other plans, especially other blue plans,’ so we can make it happen and accelerate the development of that technology,” Markovich said.
He said Stellarus has signed additional plan partners since its launch, including Bruce Insurance Company in Kansas and Hawaii.
Markovich acknowledged that relatively few Blue Shield members currently use digital health records, estimating that about 15% have access to the tool. But those who do, he said, are really embracing the technology.
And as companies like Stellarus unlock the full potential of these records, Markovich expects their use to grow.
Additionally, with midterm elections around the corner and the possibility of a new Congress starting next year, Markovich said the team is ready to go all-in on courtroom reporting to build national momentum with lawmakers on digital health records. California law allows Blue Shield to do a great deal, but to really expand these records we need greater scale.
“We’ve been doing that for several years, and we’re going to try again with a new Congress, probably in the first quarter of next year,” he said.
