The plumber of modern medicine
Every clinical trial, every pharmaceutical decision, every claim of "real-world evidence" rests on a quiet problem: the data exists, but it is scattered, locked behind privacy law, and impossible to trace to a single patient without breaking the rules. Andrew Kress built a company to solve exactly that.
Today Andrew Kress runs HealthVerity, the Philadelphia firm he co-founded in 2014 and still leads as CEO. The pitch is deceptively plain. Healthcare data is everywhere - pharmacy claims, medical transactions, lab results, clinical narratives - and almost none of it talks to the rest. HealthVerity built the technology to link those fragments, govern who touches them, and exchange them between organizations without ever exposing who a patient actually is. Internally the framework even has a four-letter shorthand: IPGE - Identity, Privacy, Governance, Exchange.
It sounds like infrastructure because it is. The customers are life sciences companies, pharmaceutical R&D teams, and researchers who need longitudinal patient data to run smarter studies. The constraint - the thing that makes the whole business hard and interesting - is that the patient can never be the price of the insight. De-identification and patient identity resolution are not features bolted on at the end. They are the architecture.
We have been consistent since our inception in our strategy and approach to evolving the healthcare data ecosystem and supporting our clients as they shift towards patient-centricity.
The money has followed the thesis. In June 2021 HealthVerity closed $100 million in Series D funding led by Durable Capital Partners, with existing backers Flare Capital Partners, Foresite Capital and Greycroft along for the round. That brought the total raised to roughly $142 million. The capital went where the story said it would: scaling the IPGE platform, expanding the real-world data ecosystem, and sharpening the patient identity resolution technology that makes the rest possible.
An English major in a server room
Here is the detail that does not fit the LinkedIn template: Kress holds a B.A. in English from Yale. No computer science. No statistics degree. He arrived in one of the most technical corners of healthcare and learned the plumbing by running it.
Before HealthVerity, he was CEO of SDI Health, the recognized leader in clinical and transactional healthcare data analytics. Under him SDI grew into the nation's second-largest pharmaceutical informatics company - more than 600 employees - and assembled one of the largest linked, de-identified healthcare data assets available anywhere. It also made a string of strategic acquisitions along the way. In 2011, IMS Health bought it.
Most people would have stayed and collected the title. Kress did stay - for a while. As Senior Vice President of Healthcare Value Solutions at IMS Health from 2011 to 2014, he oversaw Real World Evidence Solutions, Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Payer and Provider Services, Clinical Trial Optimization and Government Services. He built the company's mobile health offerings and designed its emerging genomics strategy. Then, in 2014, he left to start over from a blank page. HealthVerity was the result.
The transformative potential of real-world data lies in driving smarter clinical trials - while preserving patient privacy and ensuring interoperability across datasets.
The data man on the art board
There is a second through-line that the funding rounds miss. Kress sits on the board of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, elected a trustee in 2018, where he serves on the Marketing and Technology committees. He has also served on the boards of the Pennsylvania Ballet and The Agnes Irwin School. The man who spends his days inside de-identified medical transactions spends a good share of his civic life inside galleries and rehearsal halls.
It is not as strange as it looks. An English major who builds data infrastructure and patrons an art academy is, underneath, the same person: someone who treats pattern, structure and meaning as the actual product. The data is just the medium.
Grew SDI Health into the nation's second-largest pharma informatics company.
Total capital raised by HealthVerity across rounds through Series D.
Pioneered the Identity-Privacy-Governance-Exchange platform model.
Elected Trustee of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Where this is going
The ambition is consistent enough to be almost stubborn: make real-world data interoperable and usable for the people developing medicine, and never let the patient's privacy become collateral. HealthVerity has kept building on that line - introducing Taxonomy, billed as a national standard for healthcare data, and putting Kress on real-world data panels at industry gatherings like Datapalooza. The story he tells in 2026 is the same one he told in 2014. The difference is how much of the industry now runs on it.