Daniel Kortan
State Director, PointClickCare — The Strategist of Stall and Surveillance
Dan Kortan holds the title of "State Director" at PointClickCare, a vendor positioned at the intersection of government healthcare, digital surveillance, and profit-driven stagnation. On paper, his work appears collaborative—focused on stakeholder management, health informatics, and strategic partnerships. In practice, Kortan was sent in to sabotage progress, manipulate data access, and halt momentum around the HealthChoice Illinois ADT program.
When PointClickCare won the contract to run Illinois' Health Information Exchange (HIE), they did so by underbidding their competitor by $12 million. This aggressive pricing, enabled by the backroom alliance with Kary Nulisch and furthered by Kortan, was never about innovation or service delivery. It was about control. Kortan didn’t step in to solve problems—he stepped in to suppress them. He became a firewall between Dana Wilson’s groundbreaking transparency work and the information legally required to support it.
Under Kortan’s direction, the vendor stopped supporting meaningful integration of hospital and provider data, deliberately withholding information that was part of the signed agreement. Rather than helping to move the system toward real-time interoperability, Kortan aligned with HFS insiders—Kati Hinshaw, Deepak Dhankher, and Dave Barnes—to isolate Dana, discredit her program, and reroute momentum away from Medicaid-serving patients and toward commercial health plans and profit-generating schemes.
Key Flags:
Backchannel Coordination: Kortan continued to collaborate with Laura Zaremba (former Governor’s Office & HMA) even after her official exit from state service, raising red flags about long-term strategies to privatize state infrastructure and ensure HFS oversight remains in the hands of legacy political operatives.
Diversion from Medicaid Priorities: By focusing PointClickCare's efforts on national health plans and high-revenue payer groups, Kortan abandoned the core purpose of HealthChoice Illinois ADT—to serve the real-time care coordination needs of Medicaid beneficiaries.
Obstruction of Contract Transparency: Dana Wilson, the appointed steward of the program, faced deliberate roadblocks and contract violations—44 counts ignored—as Kortan systematically made himself unavailable, ignored written follow-ups, and engaged only when pressured.
Conclusion: Dan Kortan plays the role of the polished vendor liaison who says the right things in meetings, but behind the scenes participates in a data laundering machine built to profit, obscure, and control. His affiliations with public-private entities like PointClickCare and HMA demonstrate the deep entrenchment of corporate interests in what should be a publicly accountable system. His presence in the story isn’t as a builder of solutions—it’s as a handler of narrative, a sealer of files, and a protector of the system that exploits those it's paid to serve.
In short: He wasn't sent to fix it. He was sent to make sure you never could.
