About Ian Juliano
Ian Juliano is the Executive Chairman and Founder of Trella Health. He built the company on a simple conviction: as value-based care expands, objective performance data becomes essential to connecting the right patients with the right providers for better outcomes and lower costs.
That conviction took shape during Ian’s years in post-acute healthcare. After acquiring a home health and hospice EMR business at Brightree and later serving as CEO of HomecareCRM, he saw a fundamental problem firsthand: providers were making critical decisions about care transitions, referral relationships, and care planning with little visibility into actual performance outcomes. He became convinced that healthcare needed better data infrastructure to improve both cost and quality and pioneered to build it.
The early analysis confirmed the thesis almost immediately. In one of Trella’s first examples, a Midwestern health system was referring patients equally to two skilled nursing facilities despite one having a thirty-day readmission rate roughly five times higher than the other. To pursue the vision at scale, Trella needed data few organizations had ever accessed. Through persistence and relationship-building, Ian and his team earned the trust of CMS leadership and navigated the rigorous process to reach the Chronic Conditions Warehouse, a repository of nearly two billion healthcare claims annually, making Trella among the first private healthcare technology companies granted access at that scale.
From there, the team moved quickly, launching a hospice analytics platform with physician affiliation data the market had never seen and signing its first beta customer within months. Over seven years, Ian helped create an entirely new category of healthcare intelligence while building a culture to match. Trella was named one of Modern Healthcare’s Best Places to Work, ranking among the top 20 organizations nationally, and was recognized by LinkedIn as one of its Top Startups.
Ian’s focus on healthcare is deeply personal. At thirteen, he was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease and received two starkly different treatment recommendations from two qualified physicians. The experience left a lasting impression: getting to the right provider, one with experience relevant to a specific condition, can have an enormous impact on outcomes. A self-described “frustrated economist,” Ian is fascinated by how markets become more efficient, and believes healthcare’s persistent lack of transparency around quality, performance, and cost creates significant, avoidable variability in patient outcomes. Reducing that variability remains the heart of Trella’s mission.
He is especially energized by what comes next. For years, healthcare has relied on retrospective data, looking backward to understand what happened. Ian sees AI as the opportunity to look forward: estimating the likely outcomes of different care pathways, providers, and services based on historical performance and patient characteristics. With the industry’s richest post-acute dataset, the question he finds most compelling is how accurately that information can model future outcomes and improve decisions before care is ever delivered.
Prior to founding Trella, Ian spent more than fifteen years in corporate development, mergers and acquisitions, and strategy, where he led or played a key role in roughly $500 million of completed acquisitions and participated in more than $1 billion of bids across fintech and healthcare IT. He also served as CFO of a venture-backed fintech company in Atlanta, a simultaneous startup and turnaround that he guided to a successful exit. He began his career as a consultant at Price Waterhouse, holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and earned dual degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he entered the Wharton School as a wrestling recruit before completing a second degree in psychology.
Above all, Ian considers being a father his most important role. A lifelong learner, he is happiest pushing outside his comfort zone, studying piano, taking voice lessons, practicing Spanish and Portuguese (and reviving his French with the help of AI), and, more recently, working on his golf game with mixed but improving results. Having grown up in modest means with people who believed in him when it mattered most, Ian regards helping others as both an obligation and a privilege, and carries a single belief through his work and life: growth never really ends.
