At HIMSS 2025 in Las Vegas, b.nicely Related Well being drew consideration for demonstrating end-to-end affected person knowledge retrieval through the TEFCA community, in partnership with CommonWell Well being Alliance. Final week, b.nicely founder and CEO Kristen Valdes and Paul Wilder, CommonWell’s government director, spoke with Healthcare Innovation concerning the implications of sufferers with the ability to entry their very own longitudinal well being knowledge simply and the subsequent steps they envision.
In collaboration with CommonWell and athenahealth, b.nicely verified the affected person’s id by CLEAR. It securely transmitted verified demographics to CommonWell, a Certified Well being Data Community (QHIN) below TEFCA. It then retrieved complete affected person knowledge places and extracted detailed well being info through CCDAs. Then b.nicely demonstrated changing complicated medical information into accessible, patient-friendly summaries, the corporate stated.
Healthcare Innovation: Kristen, might you begin by speaking about a few of the implications of sufferers with the ability to entry their information this simply through TEFCA?
Valdes: I’ve a toddler with a uncommon illness. Not getting access to her medical information has actually formed the time to analysis and the time to therapy, and medical errors have practically price her her life all through our whole journey. This is not earth-shattering from a expertise perspective, however from a affected person and a caregiver perspective, it’s earth-shattering. Particularly for many who must see a lot of specialists, or who’re older, we do not bear in mind the names of all the medical doctors that we have ever seen. We have not tracked them over time. We do not have a pure library of issues that make up our healthcare. However on the identical time, not getting access to our info to present to physicians who’re treating us or specialists who have to become involved in our care delays their capacity to diagnose and deal with.
The largest friction level for shoppers to accessing their medical information is that we put this idea of a portal login in the best way of giving individuals their knowledge. Individuals like my daughter have 26 scientific affected person portals, and there’s no interoperability between portals. I do not know that there essentially must be, however shoppers ought to have the appropriate to entry their info and share it with whomever they understand so as to add worth of their care.
HCI: Are you able to describe a bit about what you demonstrated at HIMSS?
Valdes: The sweetness in it’s how elegantly easy it’s, as a result of shoppers should not have to know all of the handshakes and complexities and networks behind the scenes. However we do consider in advancing privateness by making this safer. TSA-level screening of a person to say David is who David says he’s behind the system ought to have the ability to unlock the place your information are, and together with your consent, have the ability to deliver them in. That is what I feel we’re so enthusiastic about.
We did a video demonstration at HIMSS of how simple that is with an individual we known as Kate. Doing the multi-factor authentication takes one minute to get arrange and to get verified. We created the account, and we needed to get her medical information, so Kate clicks on ‘get medical information,’ and it goes out to the CommonWell community, and utilizing her demographics that we collected, it took about 30 seconds to search out that she had information, and it begins returning them into her well being abstract. Then you’ll be able to see all of her info traditionally, straight from athena, by the use of CommonWell. Then there are interfaces that b.nicely builds to be able to make that info comprehensible by shoppers.
It took lower than a minute and a half to get any individual their whole medical historical past from their major care supplier on athena, together with signing up for IAL2-level id. That is the frictionless expertise that buyers deserve. [IAL stands for Identity Assurance Level. With NIST’s IAL2, evidence supports the real-world existence of the claimed identity and establishes the applicant as the true owner of this identity.]
HCI: So are different EHR builders and well being methods ?
Valdes: We’d like extra adoption. Whereas athena has stated, sure you are able to do all of this with out logging right into a portal with a password to every considered one of your medical doctors, now we have different EHR distributors which might be saying, ‘OK we’ll use the IAL2 to circulate, however we nonetheless need you to place in your portal login and password, and there is not any good cause for that. So we’re working with the business, and we now even have quite a few well being methods which might be saying they wish to take part, they usually’re elevating their hand to say, that is the best way that we should always create frictionless entry to knowledge for shoppers.
HCI: While you get all this knowledge again, how tough is it for b.nicely to transform it into accessible, patient-friendly summaries? Do you generally get tons of information again about any individual, after which it is tough to make that intelligible to the affected person themselves?
Valdes: Sure, it is actually tough. FHIR APIs by the U.S. Core have gone a good distance to enhance that, however many individuals are nonetheless transacting by older, extra legacy sort change pathways like CCDAs. We now have to do semantic interoperability. We now have to de-duplicate, as a result of we get the identical info from a number of suppliers and a number of methods. We’re bringing collectively knowledge between payer, supplier, pharmacy and lab that traditionally has not been merged, and it was by no means designed to go nicely collectively. We now have one thing that we name the intelligence layer that we run on the uncooked knowledge that is available in so we will normalize it and show it to a person in a method the place they will see whether or not their labs are regular or not. All of these issues are extremely sophisticated.
HCI: Is the hope that this may result in an ecosystem of startup corporations that present particular person entry providers as intermediaries to the well being methods — with b.nicely as a chief instance?
Wilder: I feel you are going to see extra innovation with the information, however the knowledge is tough to work with. Kristen’s group has performed job of that, however with out releasing the information, why would anybody attempt to determine the way to innovate on that, proper? Different individuals are most likely going to attempt to observe, as a result of upon getting this spigot, now you’ll be able to take a look at the information, and now now we have giant language fashions, and you may see if they will attempt to determine these things out for you, however it’s nonetheless going to be more durable than it appears.
I feel, b.nicely and those that’ve performed this work for the final couple of years have vital runway to work with a aggressive benefit. We welcome the precise utility for the pre-diabetic, as an illustration. I assume that b.nicely will add issues which might be particular to illness states. When you get all the way down to distinctive issues, I’d anticipate distinctive micro-apps to seem.
HCI: Is it vital that different QHINs moreover CommonWell become involved in particular person entry providers?
Wilder: I feel lots of them do not but have the onboarding service to have a b.nicely join. However b.nicely has used others over time to check numerous items and on-ramps. And for now, we’re blissful to be their dwelling, and hope we will preserve that belief relationship. So I do not assume there are sufficient collaborating because the on-ramps, however I’ve given up on preventing to power them to do it, and as an alternative I really like the concept of proving to everybody else why that stance is improper and seeing what occurs from there. Let the market affect peoples’ hearts and minds. Show that it really works. If you will get 40% of the market moved, that’s sufficient of a voice that they can not not hear it and can’t begin to react to the unfavourable components that they understand they’re creating, both by intent or by chance. We wish to educate that it is potential and it is secure.
HCI: Kristen, the rest you wish to say about subsequent steps? You talked about working with the opposite well being methods. Does this additionally contain working with extra EHR distributors?
Valdes: Sure. I feel Paul does the heroic effort of serving to to assist and show to others that that is potential and the way they need to be doing this from a next-step perspective — to indicate what we simply did, however do it nationally at scale. We’d like extra adoption of the TEFCA community. We’d like individuals to hitch. We additionally want well being methods whose EHRs haven’t configured options to just accept IAL to work round their EHRs and reply, as a result of they’ve the power and expertise to try this. They want to reply to an IAL2 token as a result of it’s the proper factor to do from a client perspective.
We’d like for all entities to know that client entry is a federal mandate. It’s one thing that’s right here to remain, and it’s one thing that buyers really want. So we would like extra individuals to undertake, however there additionally must be the adoption of the IAL2 token. There are a variety of id suppliers. B.nicely simply occurs to accomplice with CLEAR. They have been an exceptional accomplice to us. And IAL2 is one thing that we’d like payers and suppliers and labs and pharmacies and healthcare stakeholders to undertake, as a result of it is considerably safer and extra personal. And IAL2 can be a gating issue that we have put onto the nationwide networks, as a result of we do not need anybody simply coming in and with the ability to steal demographics.
I used to work within the Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Providers’ fraud, waste and abuse space as a contractor, and you possibly can purchase an inventory of Medicare beneficiaries for lower than $300 on the road with all of their info to establish them. As we’re shifting into this digital period, that detection is actually vital. We wish to make it possible for an increasing number of individuals are adopting these further privateness instruments in order that we will begin to scale back each fraud, waste and abuse in our healthcare supply system, but additionally make individuals really feel extra assured that they will acquire and combination their information and that they are safe and used solely by them.
