ELLKAY provides healthcare data orchestration technology designed to help organizations connect, govern, coordinate, and activate data across the healthcare continuum. The company currently connects more than 58,000 practices, 400+ hospitals, and 770+ clinical laboratories, supported by more than 4,000 reusable integration templates. Pulse 2.0 interviewed ELLKAY President and Chief Executive Officer Ajay Kapare to learn more about the company’s healthcare data platform, interoperability strategy, customer growth, and future plans.
Ajay Kapare’s Background
When asked about his background, Kapare shared:
My background combines technology, business strategy, and healthcare. I began my career with a degree in computer engineering and later earned an MBA in marketing, which gave me a valuable perspective on both how technology works and how it can be applied to solve real business and clinical challenges.
Before joining ELLKAY, I held product, marketing, and strategy leadership roles at organizations including Sunquest Information Systems, now part of Clinisys, and CompuGroup Medical.
Those experiences allowed me to work across product strategy, sales enablement, industry relations, and strategic partnerships.
I joined ELLKAY in 2016 and since then have held several leadership positions, including President and Chief Strategy Officer, before becoming President and CEO in March 2025.
What has kept me in healthcare technology is the opportunity to make a meaningful difference.
The work we do may happen behind the scenes, but ensuring healthcare data is accessible, connected, and trusted directly supports the clinicians, organizations, and caregivers serving patients every day.
That shared sense of purpose, and the opportunity to work alongside people who are equally committed to improving healthcare, is what continues to motivate me.
Leadership Responsibilities
When asked about his primary responsibilities, Kapare explained:
I work collaboratively with ELLKAY’s leaders and teams to set the vision and direction for the company and ensure we have the right people, strategy, and resources to deliver on our goals.
It can be intimidating to sit at the center of a large, rapidly evolving healthcare IT company, especially in the current environment.
Today, our technology connects more than 58,000 practices, 400+ hospitals, and 770+ clinical labs, with more than 4,000 reusable integration templates behind that scale.
At that scale, there’s a lot to consider as we think about who we are and where we want to be.
It’s critical to stay aware of where the industry is headed while also staying close to our customers, so we can help them put their data to better use and improve care and operations.
One of my favorite things about my role is listening and learning.
I want to know what our customers and healthcare IT leaders think, learn what works for them and what doesn’t, and have open communication around those things.
I also lean heavily into the expertise and creativity of the team we’ve built here at ELLKAY.
From my perspective, no idea is a bad idea. It’s something to think through, plan for, and execute if it makes sense.
Giving teams the freedom to try things and find better ways to meet customer and market needs is one of the reasons ELLKAY has continued to grow and evolve.
Core Products And Services
When asked about ELLKAY’s core products and services, Kapare detailed:
ELLKAY’s Healthcare Data Orchestration platform ensures data flows reliably throughout the healthcare continuum.
It’s designed to reduce the need for multiple point solutions and give organizations a single point of accountability for managing and coordinating their data.
Through multiple, interlocking capabilities, it works across the data lifecycle, transforming fragmented data into trusted, usable information that’s delivered where and when it’s needed.
Key aspects of the platform include three layers:
- Interoperability & Workflow Layer: Connects systems, orchestrates exchanges, and powers enterprise workflows.
- Network Ecosystem Connectivity Layer: Connects labs, payers, networks, partners, and communities.
- Data Lifecycle & Governance Layer: Unifies, governs, and activates data across its entire lifecycle.
Healthcare Data Challenges
When asked about challenges he has seen in healthcare in recent years and how ELLKAY has responded, Kapare explained:
We serve hospitals and health systems, ambulatory care providers, laboratories, HIT vendors, payers, and more.
Although each of these settings has its own challenges, they all wrestle with the same underlying problem: disconnected data that’s hard to trust and expensive to keep moving.
Healthcare organizations are sitting on an enormous amount of data, spread across a growing web of systems, applications, and vendors, each managing its own piece.
The trouble is that no one is accountable for making it all work together.
What organizations are missing is a way to turn all those disparate pieces into something meaningful.
That requires more than connectivity, which reliably moves data. It requires orchestration, which ensures that data is trusted, timely, and ready for use.
ELLKAY is a leader in healthcare data orchestration because we’ve been living in that world for some time.
Our technology is designed to bring together data from disparate sources, translate it into trusted information, and make sure it gets where it needs to be when it needs to be there, with strong security and governance underneath it all.
How The Technology Has Evolved
When asked how ELLKAY’s technology has evolved to meet healthcare’s changing needs, Kapare said:
Our company began primarily in lab connectivity and then expanded into data migration and archiving.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve grown across settings and increased our capabilities as healthcare and our customers’ needs have changed.
Our expansion and evolution has been significant as we’ve grown our footprint and role in the healthcare space.
Now, we’re moving beyond interoperability, connectivity, and data management to help our customers coordinate their data across systems, networks, and workflows.
We strive to not only be the partner that bridges the gaps between other systems, but help our partners end to end, so they can work with one partner for all of their data needs, rather than turning to multiple point-to-point vendors.
We currently connect to more than 750 EHR and practice management systems and more than 770 laboratories, and we’re the exclusive Technical Services Partner for CommonWell Health Alliance.
With more than 4,000 reusable integration templates, we stopped solving the same problem twice a long time ago.
That experience and existing connectivity give us a strong foundation as we continue to deepen our capabilities around healthcare data orchestration.
Key Company Milestones
When asked about some of ELLKAY’s most significant milestones, Kapare highlighted:
A few stand out.
Becoming CommonWell Health Alliance’s exclusive Technical Service Provider was a turning point. We went from supporting a network to being trusted with the infrastructure behind data exchange for over 200 million patients across 34,000+ provider organizations, right as they were moving toward QHIN status under TEFCA.
MEDITECH choosing us to run interface services for MEDITECH-as-a-Service was another one. A partner of that size doesn’t hand you their customers’ connectivity unless they’ve watched you operate.
And getting invited to the White House for the CMS Digital Health Ecosystem launch, that was a moment where I realized the industry conversation had finally caught up to what we’ve been building for two decades.
Orchestration isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the engine.
But if I’m honest, the milestone I’m proudest of isn’t a press release, it’s watching customers like Lehigh Valley cut costs 60%+ across 120 archiving projects, or CommonWell resolving 1.2 billion patient records down to 470 million real people.
It’s providers being able to deliver patient care based on having the complete history of who they’re helping.
That’s the whole point.
Customer Success Story
When asked to share specific customer success stories or examples of how ELLKAY’s technology is helping customers, Kapare said:
We have numerous success stories we could share, from helping organizations decommission legacy systems and extract data from patient charts to improving integration timelines and reducing redundant data connections.
One example that stands out is our work with San Ysidro Health, a nonprofit healthcare organization serving more than 161,000 patients.
When San Ysidro was transitioning from multiple EHR systems to Epic, they needed to migrate and archive legacy data while also building an interoperability framework that could connect Epic with labs, HIEs, third-party applications, immunization registries, and other systems.
We partnered with San Ysidro’s team across their entire journey, migrating and preserving their data, building and managing integrations, and ensuring critical information remained accessible throughout the transition.
The health system’s 3,200-plus staff across more than 50 sites now have seamless access to the information they need to support patients in real time.
Just as important, we helped them build a scalable data infrastructure that can grow and evolve along with them.
Growth And Scale
When asked about ELLKAY’s recent growth and business metrics, Kapare explained:
ELLKAY has grown consistently year over year, and that momentum continues today.
We currently work with 58,000+ practices, 400+ hospitals, and 770+ clinical labs.
Our growth is a direct result of listening to our customers and their needs.
We’ve expanded our capabilities to address recurring pain points and drive real outcomes for the organizations we support.
ELLKAY is always finding ways to fill the spaces between vendors and systems.
Market Opportunity
When asked how large he sees the opportunity for ELLKAY as healthcare organizations require greater access to and exchange of health data, Kapare said:
Although data orchestration challenges have existed for a while, the industry is starting to reach a turning point.
Nearly all of our clients are layering new complexity onto their data environment from multiple directions.
They’re launching AI initiatives, navigating mergers & acquisitions, expanding EHR platforms into new affiliates and clinics, participating in national networks, adopting more digital health applications, and responding to an increasingly complicated regulatory environment.
These are all important steps forward, but each can add another vendor, interface, workflow, or compliance requirement that somebody must manage.
Multiply that across a system, and you get the rapidly expanding tangle we see everywhere: hundreds of applications and vendors, thousands of interfaces to build and maintain, millions of messages moving daily, and countless workflows and handoffs downstream depending on every one of these interactions landing correctly.
This presents a significant opportunity for us to step into the problem and partner with organizations to solve it.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates ELLKAY from its competition, Kapare explained:
Fundamentally, ELLKAY’s platform supports healthcare organizations across the data lifecycle.
We’re not simply solving one piece of the data puzzle; we’re connecting the pieces through a single platform to make the data meaningful and usable.
We also work across sectors, which gives us visibility into how data needs to move between parts of healthcare, not just within one setting.
And because we already have an expansive network of connections, interfaces, and templates, our customers can tap into an established ecosystem rather than starting from scratch, making it easier to address their data needs at scale.
Our technology is just one differentiator. How we partner with our customers is another.
We deliver on our promises, remain accountable for the work we do, and stay closely connected to our clients as their needs change.
And when things don’t go as planned, we have open conversations about that.
I think a company should always be learning, not just from its accomplishments but from the times things don’t meet expectations.
We value our client partnerships and the opportunities they give us to think about complex problems differently.
That collaboration drives product innovation and ensures our decisions are informed by real-world insights and market dynamics.
Future Goals
When asked about ELLKAY’s future goals and what he is most focused on as the company continues to grow, Kapare concluded:
Our next chapter will involve continuing to expand our data orchestration capabilities and finding ways to help organizations activate their data to address today’s challenges and prepare for what’s next.
Whether it be sunsetting old systems, onboarding new ones, or creating a strong data foundation for transformative AI projects, we will be there, evolving alongside our partners and helping them make the most of their data.
