HealthEx Launches Apple Wallet-Style Platform for Patient Data Control Under TEFCA

HealthEx, in collaboration with athenahealth, CLEAR, MedAllies, and CommonWell Health Alliance, launched a comprehensive patient data interoperability platform that leverages individual access services under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement. The platform promises to revolutionize how patients access and control their medical information, offering functionality comparable to Apple Wallet technology for health records management.

The platform supports both consolidated clinical document architecture and FHIR-based exchange, enabling seamless data access across health systems while supporting emerging artificial intelligence applications. Through this cross-industry effort, patients can now access, retrieve, and share their medical information with whomever they choose, maintaining complete control over their healthcare data throughout the process.

Identity verification and authentication are handled through CLEAR, a NIST IAL2/AAL2-certified service, ensuring secure access to sensitive health information. The platform captures patient consent before retrieving clinical records from current IAS exchange purpose responders like athenahealth, facilitating data exchange through TEFCA-qualified health information networks including MedAllies and CommonWell Health Alliance.

Consumer-directed data exchange remains central to the platform's design. Patients maintain control over access to their healthcare data while the platform enforces their consent and choices at the point of data delivery. The system provides transparent audit trails, showing precisely who accessed data and when, addressing longstanding concerns about data privacy and unauthorized access.

"Our pioneering work with HealthEx enables IAS transactions from athenahealth to HealthEx across our QHIN, supporting the CMS vision for identity-verified, auditable, patient-initiated data access," said Dr. John Blair, CEO of MedAllies, in the announcement.

The platform addresses practical healthcare coordination challenges. For example, a Medicare patient recovering from cataract surgery can use HealthEx to access records from multiple providers, facilitating medication coordination between their surgeon and primary care doctor at different hospitals. This capability supports federal efforts to "kill the clipboard" by enabling meaningful record sharing that can inform healthcare decisions and ease navigation through complex treatment journeys.

"IAS is essential to making health data truly portable and empowering patients by giving them expanded control and access to their health information in its entirety," Sam Lambson, athenahealth's VP data and ecosystem platform, said in the statement. "With IAS enabled at scale across athenahealth, solutions like HealthEx demonstrate how patients can truly benefit from seamless, standards-based access to their own medical history."

While some consumers have connected with their electronic health record data through various apps, enabling data exchange with multiple providers at scale has remained challenging. Although EHR vendors and QHINs under TEFCA have committed to supporting IAS, implementation has been limited until now.

"Patients can now authenticate and consent to receive their health records in real time when they need them most to make better health decisions," said Dr. Priyanka Agarwal, CEO of HealthEx, in a statement. "Patients remain in control of their data at all times."

"Healthcare is personal and secure identity verification is the foundation of safe access to personal health information," David Bardan, CLEAR's general manager of healthcare, added. "Working with HealthEx we can bring frictionless, IAL2-verified identity to patients so they can unlock their health records with confidence and ease."