As part of Boomerang Ventures’ ongoing series highlighting leaders across its portfolio—introduced in “10 Leaders Shaping the Future of Connected Health Technology”—we are featuring the executives driving innovation across the connected health landscape.
In this Q&A, Jean Ross, RN, Co-Founder of Primary Record, shares how her experience as a nurse and caregiver led her to rethink one of healthcare’s most persistent challenges: care coordination. Drawing on years spent in intricate care environments, Jean brings a deeply human and systems-level perspective to building infrastructure that empowers patients and families to manage, understand, and share their health information in real time.
Origin & Strategic Insight
What inspired the creation of your company, and what unmet need did you initially see in the market?
I’m a nurse. For most of my career, I worked in complex care environments. I saw firsthand that the success of a treatment plan depended on far more than what happened in a hospital or doctor’s office. Patients move between hospitals, specialists, rehab, home care, and family support. Yet the information that tells their story stays locked inside individual systems. Families end up carrying binders, maintaining spreadsheets, or trying to remember critical details during the most stressful moments of their lives.
Primary Record started from a simple observation: the people doing the real work of coordinating care—families, caregivers, and community professionals—rarely have the tools or authority to manage the information they’re responsible for. We built Primary Record to give patients and the people supporting them a place where their full health story can live, travel, and be shared safely across care teams, systems, and states.
When did you realize this problem required a fundamentally different solution rather than incremental improvement?
The industry has spent decades trying to solve coordination through integrated electronic health records (EHR) and improved interoperability between institutions. But that approach assumes the healthcare system itself is the center of coordination.
In reality, care coordination happens in the community, inside homes, across family networks, and through professionals who often work entirely outside traditional healthcare systems. That became undeniable when I left the bedside and started KayBee, a nurse-led care coordination model. I experienced firsthand how families are repeatedly asked to rebuild the same health history with every new provider, resource, and payor.
The missing layer isn’t better pipes between institutions. It’s infrastructure that centers the patient and their support network as active participants, not passive subjects, in managing and sharing their health story.
What makes your approach differentiated in today’s connected health landscape?
Most connected health technologies are designed to connect institutions to each other. Primary Record connects patients and their real-world care team to the system and puts them in control of directing their health information where it needs to go, in real time.
Today’s “integrated” systems operate on a flawed premise: that if enough hospitals, specialists, and community organizations adopt the same platforms, information will flow freely. But no network achieves 100% coverage. The patients who need coordination the most, those managing complex conditions across 3 to 7 different providers and patient portals, are the ones left assembling binders, duplicating lab and imaging tests, and hand-carrying progress notes between offices because their information never followed them.
We focus on what we call the “last mile” of healthcare—the coordination work happening between appointments, across families, community health workers, advocates, and emerging care models. Rather than replacing EHR systems, we extend them by creating a shared coordination layer that organizes, understands, and safely shares the patient’s full record among everyone involved in their care.
We build from the patient out, because that’s the only way to reach the people and places traditional health IT was never designed to serve.
The Problem & Its Broader Impact
What is fundamentally broken in your segment of healthcare today?
Healthcare information is fragmented across systems, but the real problem isn’t fragmentation alone. It’s that the people doing the hardest coordination work—often outside the clinical setting—have no tools designed for them.
Think of the daughter four states away helping her father navigate early-stage dementia, or the mother coordinating care for her teenager across four different children’s hospitals, fighting an aggressive cancer.
These caregivers are assembling health histories from memory, chasing records between portals, and making critical decisions without complete information. When information is hard to access and assemble, decisions slow down, tests get repeated, and critical details get missed.
Families don’t just get frustrated—they burn out.
The system assumes patients can self-manage complex health information. But many of the people who need it most rely on family members, community health workers, and informal caregivers to help them navigate it. Those people are largely invisible in today’s health IT infrastructure, and designing for them changes everything.
Even promising policy advances have gaps. The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), the federal framework designed to establish trusted data-sharing networks across the United States, has made meaningful progress in establishing Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs), but its identity verification pathway has a critical blind spot: it does not address proxy access, guardianship, or parental rights. Caregivers, parents, and legal guardians coordinating care for complex pediatric patients or older adults who cannot advocate for themselves have no recognized pathway to pull data from these networks on their behalf. The people who need this information the most to coordinate care are still locked out. The last mile still isn’t reached.
Why has this issue persisted for so long without effective resolution?
One word: trust.
Healthcare technology has historically evolved to support billing, compliance, and clinical documentation within organizations, rather than to enable shared coordination across families, community providers, and external healthcare institutions. For most of the last decade, interoperability has been framed as a technology problem: standardize the APIs, adopt the new healthcare data standard FHIR, connect more networks. Real progress has been made, yet meaningful data sharing at scale still feels out of reach, not because the pipes are broken, but because trust is.
Today’s exchange environment operates within a policy triangle: HIPAA permits but does not require data sharing; information-blocking regulations create an expectation that data will be shared; and TEFCA introduces contractual obligations defining when participants must share. And yet the exchange still stalls. When two organizations that have never worked together before need to share data, there is no pre-existing relationship, no shared understanding of who is responsible if something goes wrong, and no clear answer to the question both sides are quietly asking: “Do I really trust who is on the other end of this request?” As data moves through patients, family members, apps, and care tools, responsibility fragments, governance struggles to follow, and trust breaks down at exactly the moment families need it most.
Even as FHIR-based interoperability standards mature, a genuine tailwind for us, the industry still wrestles with foundational questions: who owns the data, who can share it, and how trust is established across participants who may never have met. Solving those questions requires shifting the center of gravity from institutions to patients and their support networks. That’s a harder change than simply connecting systems, which is why it has taken this long.
If your solution scales as envisioned, how does it change outcomes for patients, providers, and payors?
When patients and caregivers can easily organize and share their full health story, coordination improves at every level.
Providers spend less time chasing information and more time delivering care. Families feel more confident managing complex conditions. Payors benefit from better coordination, which prevents unnecessary hospital visits. It also avoids duplicated services and medication errors. Each of these has a direct dollar value.
The use case that best illustrates this is medication safety in Mobile Integrated Health (MIH). Picture a community paramedic arriving at a patient’s home, an older adult managing 12 medications prescribed by four different providers, none of whom share the same system.
Without Primary Record, the paramedic is on the phone, faxing offices, and relying on whatever the patient can remember.
With Primary Record, the patient’s full medication list is already aggregated from their portals, reconciled against what’s actually on the kitchen table, and reviewed with AI-assisted guidance that flags dangerous duplicates, outdated prescriptions, and potential interactions, right there in the home, before something goes wrong. A live QR code on the refrigerator means any provider who walks through that door has instant access to the same reconciled list.
Ultimately, healthcare becomes more proactive and less reactive, and that shift has real dollar value for everyone in the system.
Building in Connected Health
What has been the most challenging aspect of building and scaling in this environment?
Healthcare innovation often moves more slowly than the problems it’s trying to solve. Startups must navigate regulatory requirements, security expectations, and long enterprise sales cycles while still moving fast enough to learn from the market.
The deeper challenge is trust and credibility. As a nurse-turned-founder without a traditional tech or finance background, I had to earn trust in two directions at once: with healthcare institutions who needed to believe we were a serious technology partner, and with the venture community who needed to believe care coordination was worth the investment. I’ve learned that the nursing credential is actually an asset; it signals that I understand what care coordination actually looks like in a patient’s home, not just on paper.
The external validation that has moved the needle most has come from the people doing this work every day, care managers, community paramedics, and patient advocates who tell us Primary Record is the first tool that actually fits how they coordinate care. That credibility, earned at the kitchen table rather than in a conference room, is what I trust most.
What milestones have validated that Primary Record is ready for broader adoption?
The milestone that mattered first was simply getting our first four businesses to say yes. Then came something we hadn’t expected: inbound calls from patient advocates and care businesses who found us by Googling “best patient advocate software.” We hadn’t advertised. They found us because the problem is real and the market is actively searching for a solution.
The milestone that moved the technical credibility needle was winning first place in the 2025 AMIA HL7 FHIR App Competition. That recognition opened a remarkable sequence: a featured case study in HL7 International’s 2026 “Setting the World on FHIR” series, a panel at ViVE, and an invitation to present at an American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) conference in May 2026 on closing the gap between health apps, data access, and patient engagement. For a nurse-founded company, being welcomed into that conversation by the standards community that developed the infrastructure we built on was a significant signal.
But the moment I come back to most was one that happened in an emergency department. A board member who is a physician had a question about a patient whose daughter was present and managing her elderly mother’s care. Their electronic health record couldn’t answer it, so they did what happens at millions of visits every day: they asked the daughter. She opened Primary Record and answered it right there at the bedside. Seeing it land that way, with a clinician who lives inside fragmented information every single day, was the validation I value most.
We’ve also invested deeply in the policy work around patient-directed records. Primary Record is a pledged participant in the CMS Health Data Ecosystem, committed to “Killing the Clipboard” and conversational AI. We are actively engaged in Indiana’s Rural Health Transformation stakeholder conversations and were specifically invited to apply with our patient-directed coordination model as Indiana develops its broader interoperability strategy to transform rural care. These aren’t peripheral relationships. They are early signals that the policy environment is catching up to the problem we’ve been building to solve.
How has working with Boomerang Ventures influenced your company’s trajectory?
Boomerang Ventures came in at a stage where most investors were still trying to fit us into existing health IT categories. They saw something different: the coordination gaps causing real harm in healthcare, and a policy tailwind in the 21st Century Cures Act that most hadn’t yet connected to a patient-directed opportunity. Their early belief gave us the runway to build a product we could put directly in people’s hands and begin changing minds about what integrated care coordination can actually look like.
The thesis they backed is simple but important: you can keep building around vendors, or you can build around the patient. One day, data will flow freely, so you had better be positioning yourself to help people use that data and make it meaningful in their lives.
Beyond the capital, the guidance has been just as valuable. Dr. Eric Beier, Partner & CMO at Boomerang Ventures has served on our board alongside Patrick Henshaw [from Render Capital], and having experienced investors committed to supporting two first-time founders over nearly three years has helped us stay disciplined, stay in the game, and wait for exactly the moment in the market that is happening right now.
Leadership & Perspective
How do you view your role in shaping the future of healthcare innovation?
Women, and nurses specifically, have always done the lion’s share of care coordination work that holds healthcare together. We just haven’t been the ones building the technology. That gap matters. When the people designing health IT have never sat at a kitchen table with a family trying to make sense of a discharge summary, it shows in the product.
My role, as I see it, is to build something that proves you can center the patient and still build a real business. Those two things are not in conflict; they are the same thing. If I can do that visibly, I hope it makes it a little easier for the next generation of clinician-founders to get in the room.
Have you encountered unique challenges as a female leader in venture-backed healthcare?
Yes, and I’ve deliberately chosen not to minimize those challenges or pretend they don’t exist. I’ll also be honest that, as a first-time founder, I don’t always have a clear baseline to compare against. I can’t always know with certainty whether a given experience is about gender, about being early-stage, or simply about building something the market hasn’t seen before.
What I can speak to is a pattern I’ve noticed: when a female describes the problem she’s solving from lived experience, it tends to get received as a personal story rather than a strategic insight. The same depth of understanding that would signal conviction and credibility in another context gets treated as something to appreciate rather than something to bet on.
One of my biggest challenges has been learning to build and communicate a business case. There are endless problems to solve in healthcare, and the way nurses naturally go about solving them often doesn’t come with a financial model that matches the value of the solution. I’m genuinely grateful for the resources available in Indiana. Going through GrowthX helped me understand what actually builds a business case and how to lead with that. It’s made me a sharper founder, even if I wish I had found that clarity sooner.
What leadership principle guides your decision-making during uncertainty or growth?
Stay close to the people doing the actual work. Every time I’ve lost clarity, on product, on positioning, on what to prioritize, the answer has come from a conversation with a nurse care manager, a family caregiver, or a community paramedic, not from a spreadsheet or a strategy session.
I also try to keep my eyes on what we’re actually building toward. We’re building infrastructure to drive a shift in how healthcare approaches coordination, and that doesn’t happen in a single funding cycle. Founders who build through uncertainty are the ones who stay clear about the problem they are solving. That clarity is what tells you what to build, who to hire, and how to manage the runway you’ve been given.
We are providing infrastructure that healthcare didn’t know it needed, and that takes patience, focus, and the discipline to keep coming back to the problem when your future path forward feels uncertain.
The Future of Connected Health Technology
Where do you see the biggest opportunity for transformation in healthcare over the next five years?
There is a lot happening at the state and federal levels around patient access, information blocking, and health data exchange. The CMS Health Data Ecosystem, TEFCA, the information blocking rules, and the Rural Health Transformation Program are all creating real infrastructure for data to flow in ways it couldn’t before. The question is whether that infrastructure gets used to improve outcomes or simply to move data between the same institutions in slightly more efficient ways.
The biggest opportunity is at the edges: community-based organizations, Mobile Integrated Health programs, family caregivers, and local health departments. These are the actors who are actually present when care coordination breaks down.
The next five years will determine whether we build health IT that reaches them, or whether we keep building faster pipes between hospitals while the real coordination work continues to happen in someone’s home without any support at all.
How will connected health technology redefine patient experience and access to care?
The shift I’m most focused on is moving from information access to information usability. We’ve made real progress on the access side. Patients can now see their records through apps and portals, but access without the ability to do something meaningful with that information is just a more convenient version of the same problem.
When patients and their support networks can organize, understand, and share their health stories on their own terms, in real time, the relationship between patients and the system changes. Care becomes less something that happens to you and more something you participate in shaping. That’s not a technology claim, it’s a design philosophy. But technology is what makes it possible at scale.
Picture a daughter living four states away, managing her father’s care from a distance as he navigates early-stage dementia alone. She is not his doctor. She is not in the room. But she is the person who knows which medications he actually takes, which appointments he has coming up, and which specialist said what at the last visit. Without the right tools, she is piecing that picture together from memory, emails, and whatever her father can recall on a good day. With Primary Record, she owns that full picture, organized, up to date, and shareable with any provider, caregiver, or emergency responder who needs it. She doesn’t just have access to her father’s health information. She has the ability to use it, advocate with it, and make sure it travels with him wherever care happens next.
That’s the shift that matters.
What does long-term success look like for Primary Record beyond financial performance?
Success looks like a world where the person coordinating care for an aging parent, a child with complex needs, or a patient navigating a chronic condition never has to start from scratch when they walk into a new provider’s office. Where the community health worker, during a home visit, has the same information the hospitalist had at discharge. Where the last mile of care coordination is as well-supported as the first.
Financially, we need to build a sustainable business to get there; that’s not in conflict with the mission, it’s what makes the mission possible. But the number I’ll actually celebrate is the first time a family tells us the system worked for them, not against them. We’re already starting to hear that. We want to hear it millions of times.
Quick Insights
One word that defines your company today: Collaborative
A book or experience that has shaped your leadership philosophy:
Everything April Dunford has written and spoken has shaped how I think about Primary Record’s positioning. Her core argument in Obviously Awesome is that founders tend to position their product around their own vision for it, but the real work is finding the context where your product becomes the obvious best choice for a specific customer. The humbling part? Your customers often see that context more clearly than you do. The magical moment is when your vision finally meets how your customers already talk about you. That’s when you know you’re onto something real!
Advice for the next generation of women entering health tech:
Your clinical experience, or your lived experience as a mom, daughter, aunt, or sister, is not a credential to apologize for. It’s the reason your product will work when the others don’t. Lead with it.
Looking Ahead
Primary Record is building foundational infrastructure for patient-directed care coordination, one that empowers families, supports providers, and bridges the gaps that traditional systems leave behind. As the company continues to grow, it is positioned to redefine how health information is managed, shared, and used across the full continuum of care.
Primary Record is currently raising capital to support its next phase of growth. To learn more, visit primaryrecord.com or connect directly with Jean Ross on LinkedIn.
Next month, we continue this series, highlighting another leader advancing innovation across the connected health ecosystem.
