We all want our hospital records in one place. Is Novellia the app to do it?
Shashi Shankar explains how his app unifies patients' scattered medical records all together, and what that has to do with the 21st Century Cures Act.
Onyx
By Dr. Adil Ali
March 20, 2025
Shashi Shankar, CEO of Novellia, sat down with Onyx for a feature-length interview.
Could you explain to our readers the scale of the problem you’re addressing and the solution you’ve put to market? How did Novellia come about, and what led you to this?
My story starts with my immigrant roots. My parents came over from India in the early eighties—a huge risk that meant leaving everything behind for a better life in America. Growing up as a kid of immigrants, I was constantly advised: “don’t take any risks; de-risk everything you can. Go to a good university, get a steady job.” Naturally, I followed that advice. After graduate school, I was recruited by Genentech and later by Roche to work at their U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. Over time, I took on a bunch of different roles: medical affairs, real-world data analysis, health economics, and eventually I moved into sales and marketing. My last role was with Roche in Basel, where I helped launch their global digital health technologies group—looking back, I was on a smooth, low-risk career path.
But then two things happened that turned my thinking upside down. The first was professional. In my new role leading global digital health, I started reading extensively about emerging tech trends in the U.S. One article, in particular, caught my attention—it discussed the 21st Century Cures Act.
Essentially, the Act grants every American an unfettered right to access all their medical records. This seemed revolutionary to me. Despite the massive amount of clinical data patients generate each year, from my experience in the industry, I knew that in its current form that data was painfully fragmented and scattered around everywhere. I thought, “If patients could access and share their own health records, researchers could finally compile true, longitudinal data.”
The second part of my story is deeply personal. My grandfather—one of my closest friends and a hero in my eyes—was diagnosed unexpectedly with gastroesophageal cancer. In just four intense months, he battled through multiple specialists and care settings, yet no one had a single, consolidated record of his medical history. That fragmentation wasn’t just a technical shortfall—it was a profound failure of our healthcare system. Experiencing that loss, I felt compelled to create a solution that not only advanced research but also offered patients one clear source of truth about their own health.
In America today, every patient generates massive amounts of clinical data—think how a cancer patient's medical record can hold more than 100 terabytes of data1—but the data is scattered across different systems, formats, and languages. There’s no single source of truth. Our radical thesis at Novellia is that the only way to build that unified record is to work directly with patients.
We’ve designed a platform where patients can sign up in about a minute and a half.
Once they accept our terms and conditions and authorize data access, we pull their records from numerous health systems. Behind the scenes, our backend is integrated with nearly every major hospital EMR, health system, and local clinics in the US. When a patient ‘flicks the switch,’ everything from their lab results to medication histories is consolidated in real-time. It’s not just about aggregating data; it’s about creating a continuously updated, holistic profile that reflects all the historical and current health info on record.
Read the full article here.
