Jeffrey S. Sopko
The University of Maryland Medical System has announced Gallion Health as the first spinoff from its iHarbor Innovation Center, four years after it was incubated.
Gallion Health has developed a cloud-based digital supply chain application, with the potential to enhance accuracy and compliance, and reduce costs. UMMS made an initial unspecified seed investment in the spinout, after developing the SaaS platform internally for its hospitals.
Jeffrey Sopko, the entrepreneur in residence at Yale Ventures, heads Gallion Health. An alumnus of Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, Sopko assumed the role of CEO in May.
After holding leadership roles in medtech companies such as Becton Dickinson and Medtronic, Sopko served as president and CEO of Standard Molecular, a genomic testing startup in Massachusetts, and San Marcos, Texas-based Direct Diagnostics, which commercialized a saliva test that could identify pathogens.
“Gallion validates the system’s innovation pathway and is already paying dividends for our member organizations, our staff and our patients,” said Mohan Suntha, president and CEO of UMMS. “Discovery is one of our values at UMMS and through applications like Gallion, we are continuing to be an innovation leader in the industry.”
The UMMS’ iHarbor Innovation Center is the system’s technology and incubation studio focused on using technology to address common problems in healthcare. It is headed by Chief Innovation Officer Warren D’Souza, who also serves as co-director of the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing and the Informatics Core in the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
“Gallion represents exactly what iHarbor stands for,” said D’Souza. “It is a transformative digital solution that saves time, saves money, accelerates the revenue cycle, and improves outcomes, and it’s something that is scalable across the industry.”
Gallion’s SaaS platform was first rolled out internally at UMMS in 2021, replacing a manual labor-intensive paper-based process that could give rise to errors and inefficiencies. With seamless integration with electronic health records and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, the technology has helped automate tasks such as consumption tracking, charges and contract compliance.
Over the years, UMMS says, Gallion has saved the system $2 million by improving invoice accuracy, streamlining operational efficiencies and accelerating charge capture three-fold. It saved an additional $3.5 million through retention of competitive contracts. Gallion also brought about operational improvements across UMMS’ 11 hospitals, cutting completion times by 75% and reducing the defect or error rate from 18% to 3%.
Gallion now plans to offer its platform to other hospital systems, and also attract other investors to build its commercial plans as a separate entity.
“Gallion is an innovative platform, and I look forward to shepherding the company into this next chapter,” said Sopko. “I am grateful to Dr. Suntha and the system for trusting my team to market Gallion to hospitals nationwide.”
In April, Gallion was among the winners of the 2025 Innovators Awards presented by the healthcare industry publication Modern Healthcare. In January, it was a finalist at the Gartner Power of the Profession Supply Chain Awards.
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