< + > Healthcare AI Humor – Fun Friday

Happy Friday everyone!  You made it through another week and it’s time to prepare you for the weekend with another edition of Fun Friday.  For those not familiar, it’s that time of the week where we share something funny to hopefully brighten your day, possibly learn something, and start your weekend off right.  This week we’re looking at some AI humor.

You may need to click here to see the full image.  Are you worried about losing your job to AI?  This is a nice twist on the Henry Ford quote about asking for faster horses.

This humor is a commentary on AI chatbots. (Meme circulating widely on the Web.) pic.twitter.com/Zys7BVquUq

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) May 20, 2026

This one is pretty brutal from a healthcare perspective since what we’re asking AI often can have life and death consequences.  I see most healthcare AI putting in really good guardrails.  However, consumers are often not waiting for a healthcare specific solution, so we’re going to have some really bad outcomes a long the way.

I find this worry from the younger generation quite interesting.  I’ve seen some of it in my kids who talk about them and their friends kind of kicking against AI.  I have a lot of thoughts about it all, but it’s going to be really interesting to see it play out. That said, I don’t think there’s anything that can stop it.  The reality is that AI is going to be in our future.  It’s mostly a question of in what form and fashion.  What’s your view on it?

Have a great weekend and join us back here next week for more great healthcare IT contennt.

< + > Designing MedTech from the Market Backwards – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 64

We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Theo Mastrokostopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO at Pleo Flow. This episode explores one of the biggest anti-patterns in medtech: building a technology first and only later trying to figure out who buys it, how it gets reimbursed, and whether the economics work. Mastrokostopoulos argues that successful medtech companies must design from commercialization backwards — starting with what you sell, how you price it, who buys it, and how those answers should shape product design from day one. The conversation uses Mastrokostopoulos’s current company, Pleo Flow, as a live example of how to align patient safety, physician usability, reimbursement, and hospital economics early.

Check out the main topics of discussion for this episode of the Life Sciences Today podcast:

• Tell us about your journey to Pleo Flow.
• A lot of companies say, ‘Let’s collect some clinical data, let’s see what we have, then we’ll see.’ But you believe in what you sell, how you price it, and who buys it as a way to feed the product design from day one. Do you think your way is the best way?
• How do you create value for the patients, the physicians, and the company?
• How do you capture value? How do you price it?
• What are your plans for 2026 with Pleo Flow? What are three things you want to do for your patients?
• For cardiovascular devices, what is the biggest anti-pattern in this industry?
• This is not a statistically valid number, but you do have your own sample – what percentage of MedTech startups fall on the sword of Damocles of this anti-pattern?

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Along with the popular podcasting platforms above, you can Subscribe to Healthcare IT Today on YouTube.  Plus, all of the audio and video versions will be made available to stream on Healthcare IT Today. As a former pharma-tech founder who bootstrapped to exit, I now help TechBio and digital health CEOs grow revenue—by solving the tech, team, and go-to-market problems that stall your progress. If you want a warrior by your side, connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you work in Life Sciences IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with our takes on health IT innovation in life sciences. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, or privately on our Contact Us page. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if you have any ideas for future episodes.

Thanks so much for listening!

< + > Commure Raises $70M at $7B Valuation to Transform Healthcare Operations Using AI

Fresh Capital to Accelerate AI-Powered Digital Transformation in Healthcare

Commure, the AI platform for healthcare, today announced $70 million in financing at a $7 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Kirkland & Ellis.

Commure deploys advanced AI and Agents across health systems and practices, transforming the day-to-day lives of providers and healthcare administrators. The company is focused on one of the largest cost centers in healthcare worldwide: administrative work, which consumes roughly $1 trillion a year in the U.S. alone and burdens health systems globally.

Healthcare AI Deployed at Unparalleled Scale

Commure’s revenue cycle management platform and advanced clinical workflow tools operate within more than 500 healthcare organizations across 3,000+ sites of care, embedded in the daily workflows of tens of thousands of physicians. Over 130 of the nation’s largest health systems, including HCA Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare, use the platform alongside thousands of physician-owned practices across the country.

The company’s end-to-end RCM processes tens of billions of dollars in annual payments and completes more than 85% of work without human intervention. Its Ambient AI suite, featuring Autonomous Coding and Clinical Intelligence, supports tens of millions of appointments each year.

“For thirty years, healthcare was told software would fix administrative work. It didn’t, because software could not actually do the work: the calls, the notes, the codes, the claims, the denials, and the appeals,” said Tanay Tandon, CEO at Commure. “AI can. We are already performing this work, from specialty clinics to the country’s largest health systems. With this round, we can meet the demand to run it everywhere.”‍

To support that expansion, the capital will be used to:

• Scale Commure’s revenue cycle and practice management platform across specialty practices, hospitals, and integrated delivery networks, replacing the legacy mix of BPO services, billing vendors, and rules-based software that has run the industry for decades
• Advance the shared intelligence layer beneath every Commure workflow, pushing the frontier on agentic systems so AI can reliably handle the payer rules, specialty coding, denial patterns, and clinical context that general-purpose models miss
• Expand Commure’s AI infrastructure into global healthcare markets where providers face the same structural pressure: rising demand, workforce shortages, administrative burden, and the need for more efficient clinical and financial operations

An AI-Native Platform for the Next Era of Healthcare

“Healthcare is one of the largest sectors of economies worldwide and one of the most important to rebuild with AI,” said Hemant Taneja, CEO at General Catalyst. “Commure is doing it not as a feature or co-pilot, but as a system of agents completing administrative and clinical work in fundamentally modern ways. This is a generational business with the opportunity to dramatically impact the cost of care.”

Commure, and its subsidiary Athelas, delivers AI across the front, middle, and back of the revenue cycle, helping healthcare organizations automate administrative work while giving clinicians time back to care.

About Commure

Commure delivers next-generation AI infrastructure for health systems, integrating ambient workflows, agentic AI, and revenue cycle automation on a single platform. Its Forward Deployed Engineering teams work directly with clinicians and administrators to boost margins, reduce burden, and improve patient engagement. Commure runs inside more than 500 healthcare organizations across 3,000+ sites of care, integrates with 60+ EHRs, and processes tens of billions of dollars in annual claims — with 85%+ of revenue cycle work completed without a human in the loop. Learn more at commure.com.

About Athelas

Athelas, a Commure company, provides AI-native infrastructure for modern healthcare, specializing in revenue cycle management, ambient AI, and FDA-cleared AI-powered diagnostics that streamline operations and improve patient outcomes. Learn more at athelas.com.

Originally announced May 19th, 2026

< + > Integrating Patient-Generated Data Into Clinical Workflows

Not only are healthcare organizations gaining more and more health data, patients are also actively adding to it by generating their own data. The general public is becoming increasingly more interested in their own wellness, a McKinsey report found, with 84% of US consumers, 79% of UK consumers, and 94% of Chinese consumers reporting wellness as a top or important priority. As such, health tracking devices or wearables are also on the rise in both invention and ownership, with Care Evolution finding 20-30% of adult Americans own one, and a large percentage of that group uses it daily. So, how are healthcare organizations dealing with this influx of patient-generated data?

We reached out to our talented Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — how is patient-generated data, such as data from wearables or remote monitoring devices, being integrated into clinical workflows? The following is what they had to share.

DJ Tucker, Managing Director, Healthcare Informatics at Healthcare IT Leaders
RPM and wearable integration is a clinical workflow problem first and a technical integration problem second. The data existing is no longer the challenge. The challenge is whether it arrives in the right place, in the right format, at the right moment to influence a clinical decision. A nurse toggling between five systems to assemble a complete patient picture is being failed by the informatics infrastructure.

The integration architecture the industry is converging on (FHIR-native, AI-summarized, embedded directly in the clinical view) is the right direction. Being able to see a clinically relevant synthesis of what changed, what matters, and what warrants attention is key. Getting there requires a clinical use case definition before device selection, alert threshold governance to prevent fatigue, and dashboards that connect monitoring data to actionable workflows.

Joey Kennedy, SVP, Sales at Tendo
Patient-generated data has the potential to expand the clinical picture beyond what we see during appointments. Wearables and remote monitoring tools can provide valuable signals about a patient’s health between visits. But the real challenge for health systems is integrating that information into workflows in a way that supports clinical decision-making. Organizations are focusing on identifying which signals are most meaningful and connecting that data with existing clinical and operational systems. When that integration happens effectively, clinicians gain earlier visibility into changes in a patient’s condition, and patients become more engaged partners in managing their health.

Adam Hesse, CEO at Full Spectrum
I believe we are only scratching the surface of what is possible with patient-generated data. Non-consumer products, such as continuous glucose monitors or cardiac monitors, are well integrated, but consumer products (e.g., fitness monitors) are far less utilized in a clinical setting. Cardiac monitors result in detailed reporting and alerts that shorten the time to diagnosis, whereas glucose monitors drive rich discussions with a patient’s care team to identify habits or behaviors that are negatively impacting that patient’s condition.

The most obvious and immediate impact is the ability for a care team to have a long-term view of a patient’s condition at the beginning of a clinic visit, rather than relying heavily on a patient’s self-assessment or tests that may occur after a visit. This results in more precise care with less time in the clinic, which is both lower cost and more convenient. But, more importantly than the in-clinic workflow is the ability to inform patient decisions in real time in the real world. Empowering a patient with data is a powerful method to either drive behavior changes and/or a decision to engage your care team.

Niki Panich, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Penguin Ai
Patient-generated data is only valuable if it reaches the clinician at the right moment, in a usable form. Right now, most of it is sitting in apps that do not talk to the EHR. The organizations making progress are building structured ingestion pipelines and defining clear clinical thresholds for when that data should trigger clinical action. The goal is NOT more data. It’s the right signal, surfaced at the right time.

Lucy Bichakhchyan, Marketing Manager at NeckCare
Patient-generated data from remote monitoring devices is increasingly being integrated into clinical workflows through web-based platforms that sit alongside existing practice management systems. In musculoskeletal rehabilitation — particularly cervical spine care — this typically means a clinician prescribes a home exercise program through the platform, the patient completes the exercises using a connected device, and completion data is automatically reported back to the clinician without requiring a visit or phone call.

Wearable sensors also play a role at the assessment end of the workflow. Clinicians use them to establish a baseline at intake and reassess at intervals throughout the care plan, generating objective measurements that replace or supplement manual testing.

That objectivity matters for multiple reasons. Patients who can see their own data — actual numbers showing where they started and how they’re tracking — are more likely to engage with and continue their treatment plan. The same documentation serves different purposes for insurers, referring providers, and, in personal injury cases, legal teams: it provides a defensible, timestamped record of functional status and clinical progress that subjective notes cannot replicate.

The workflow value is in consolidating that data — remote adherence, in-clinic assessment, reassessment over time — into a single record that is accessible, reportable, and billable. Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM) codes provide a reimbursement pathway for the remote monitoring component, making the business case more concrete for practices that were previously skeptical of the overhead.

The remaining integration challenge is largely one of adoption: the data and billing pathways exist, but getting clinicians to build remote monitoring into standard intake rather than treating it as an add-on is where most of the friction lies.

Antoine Pivron, Vice President at Withings Health Solutions
The majority of clinicians are flying blind between clinic visits, but wearables can surface the micro-patterns in subtle sleep disruption, activity drops, or stress spikes that can predict a patient’s risk for a health issue before it becomes a clinical event. This isn’t about overwhelming clinicians with raw data; it’s about giving them distilled, evidence-based insights that help them intervene earlier and keep patients on track to improve outcomes. Although patients generate data daily through connected devices, clinicians receive only relevant alerts directly within the dashboards they already use, allowing them to focus on what truly requires attention.

The next frontier in cardiometabolic care is continuous risk detection, with risk scores embedded directly into everyday devices. For example, we have established strong partnerships in the congestive heart failure space. In this field, rehospitalization represents a significant cost, and the ability to anticipate and detect decompensation as early as possible is both life-saving for patients and a key decision factor for clinicians.

Looking ahead, wearables and connected health tools will quietly synthesize signals from heart rate variability to sleep patterns to metabolic biomarkers, generating real-time probabilities and calculating risk scores for conditions like heart failure, hypertension, or diabetes long before symptoms appear. We’re moving toward a world where cardiometabolic risk isn’t assessed annually in a clinic, but continuously in the background of daily life.

Dr. Scott Schell, Chief Medical Officer at Cognizant
The challenge is not collecting more data but making it actionable. Health systems are integrating remote monitoring platforms and AI-powered triage tools that filter patient-generated data and surface clinically meaningful signals. When done well, this allows care teams to intervene earlier in chronic disease management and shift care from episodic visits toward continuous monitoring.

What great insights here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

How do you think patient-generated data (such as data from wearables or remote monitoring devices) is being integrated into clinical workflows? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!

< + > Unexpected Vulnerabilities: How to Contain Cyberattacks and Protect Patient Safety

The following is a guest article by Dr. Jaushin Lee, Founder and CEO at Zentera Systems

If you see “healthcare” and “cybersecurity” in the same sentence, the discussion usually focuses on protecting electronic health records (EHRs), patient portals, or core enterprise platforms. Given the amount of sensitive data they hold, it makes sense to devote significant resources to protecting them.

However, some of the most serious cybersecurity risks in the healthcare industry aren’t found in hospital EHR systems or clinical applications. Instead, they can be found woven into the thousands of connected devices and systems that support the critical work that these facilities provide—systems that aren’t often designed with leading-edge cybersecurity controls in mind.

Across the country, critical infrastructure, such as HVAC systems, oxygen supply systems, imaging equipment, and other devices, is frequently connected to the same networks as EHR systems and other healthcare applications. Many of these devices also run on specialized operating systems that make it hard to run security agents or even patch.

This interconnected environment, in which embedded but vulnerable systems play an essential role in providing effective healthcare, creates levels of risk that many organizations are just beginning to recognize. Without integrating the protections that Zero Trust provides, healthcare organizations can face consequences that extend beyond data exposure to include broad service disruptions.

Recognizing Overlooked Cyber-Risks in Hospital Infrastructure

Prioritizing security investments for major software, such as EHR systems, billing platforms, and clinical applications, makes perfect sense because they’re obvious targets for many attackers. Yet today’s more sophisticated attackers rarely begin with the most protected systems. Instead, they hunt for the weakest entry points within a network.

Several of the most commonly overlooked attack vectors are:

Building and Environmental Control Systems

HVAC controls, air filtration, and temperature management systems are often network-connected, but they’re rarely designed with modern security protections in mind, let alone tested for vulnerabilities. When attackers target these systems, they can disrupt sterile environments or critical care spaces or use them to pivot to other parts of an enterprise network—or both.

Medical Imaging and Diagnostic Equipment

Devices such as X-ray machines, CT scanners, and cardiac care systems often use embedded software that can’t support standard security tools or enable regular patching. Artificial intelligence makes it easier than ever for attackers to probe these systems and create targeted exploits to gain a foothold in a network.

Critical Infrastructure and Operational Technology (OT) Controllers

Core infrastructure and OT controllers—such as systems responsible for controlling oxygen supply and power management and utilities that operate on proprietary firmware—often lack modern authentication mechanisms or threat monitoring capabilities. This makes these OT systems low-hanging fruit for persistent threat actors.

Understanding How Cyberattacks Can Spread Inside Hospital Networks

Finding a vulnerable device or service and exploiting it to gain a foothold is rarely the most damaging part of a cyberattack; the real risk comes from what happens next: expansion across the network.

Attackers then use their newfound access to move laterally across connected systems on their hunt for more valuable targets, pivoting from device to device until they reach critical datasets or infrastructure. Because of the wide range of connected systems often comprising new and legacy equipment, hospital networks are particularly susceptible to what is known as “east-west” network movement. This allows attackers to move undetected for extended periods of time.

This means that a seemingly minor vulnerability in one OT or medical device can quickly escalate into a large incident with the potential to affect broader hospital operations.

Containing Breaches Without Network Redesign with Zero Trust

For most healthcare organizations, the idea of redesigning their entire network architecture to prevent the rapid spread of malicious activity and to improve cybersecurity isn’t realistic. Replacing, restructuring, or updating large swaths of the network can be costly, operationally risky, and time-consuming. That’s why healthcare organizations should instead focus on containing potential breaches, preventing attackers from pivoting once they have initial access.

A Zero Trust security architecture addresses this challenge by requiring system and user verification for every connection. This flips the traditional model of “assumed trust,” which is typically assigned to traffic inside a network, on its head.

Implementing a Zero Trust architecture begins with placing protective controls around one critical system at a time, slowly broadening the Zero Trust principle. These network-level controls are established to match real business operations performed by authenticated users for predefined reasons using approved devices.

By isolating sensitive infrastructure and devices, healthcare organizations can create security boundaries that limit how devices communicate with the rest of the network, ensuring that each connection request is legitimate. This type of control and segmentation ensures that even if one device is compromised, attackers can’t easily spread to other systems.

Using Zero Trust to Secure What Matters Most

Modern Zero Trust platforms give healthcare cybersecurity teams the ability to introduce strong access controls around their critical systems and applications without requiring expensive and risky changes to their network infrastructure. By verifying users, devices, and applications before allowing connections, Zero Trust helps ensure that only legitimate activity is allowed to flow through the network.

By making this shift to a Zero Trust architecture, healthcare organizations can then focus their security efforts where they matter most: protecting the systems that directly support patient care and hospital operations. Instead of relying on perimeter defenses alone, Zero Trust security platforms provide a way to ensure that trust is continuously evaluated and access is tightly controlled. Ultimately, this helps healthcare providers to not just prevent data breaches and protect patient care but also build network environments that are more resilient and better able to withstand tomorrow’s rapidly evolving threats.

About Jaushin Lee

Dr. Jaushin Lee is the Founder and CEO at Zentera Systems. He is a serial entrepreneur with many patents. He is also the visionary architect behind CoIP Platform, Zentera’s award-winning Zero Trust security overlay. Jaushin has more than 20 years of management and executive experience in networking and computer engineering through his experience with Cisco Systems, SGI, and Imera Systems.

< + > Century Health Raises $5M Seed Round as AI-Powered Platform Achieves 97% Accuracy in Clinical Data Abstraction

• The Round was Led by Origin Ventures with Participation from InnovateHealth Ventures, 25madison, Next Play Ventures, 2048 Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Strategic Angels
• The Century Health Abstraction & Retrieval Model (CHARM) has Achieved 97% Accuracy Compared to Clinical Expert Judgment as it Scales Across Life Sciences
• Century Health’s Data Network and Abstraction Platform Supply Proprietary Real-World Clinical Data; A Critical Resource for Accelerating AI Use Cases in Life Sciences

Century Health, a pioneer in applying AI to real-world clinical data to accelerate research, today announced an oversubscribed $5 million seed round led by Origin Ventures, with participation from new investors InnovateHealth Ventures, 25madison, and Next Play Ventures, and continuing investors 2048 Ventures and Alumni Ventures. Strategic angel investors in the round include Zorba Lieberman, founder of Citeline, and clinicians across nephrology, neurology, and ophthalmology. The funding will be used to scale collaborations and use cases with pharmaceutical and life sciences partners, grow its specialty provider data network, and expand its AI-powered data curation infrastructure.

Century Health was founded to reimagine how clinical data is used to benefit patients. The company’s Century Health Abstraction & Retrieval Model (CHARM) is a tailored, AI-powered platform that automates the curation and enrichment of fragmented clinical data, creating high-quality real-world evidence (RWE) to accelerate therapeutic development and drive clinical outcomes.

Clinical research has long been constrained by the time and cost of manual data curation. While electronic health records (EHRs) contain rich longitudinal patient information, much of it remains locked in unstructured formats, such as clinical notes, radiology reports, and physician documentation. Century Health automates the data identification and abstraction process, creating high-quality, research-ready datasets.

CHARM now achieves 97% accuracy when validated against clinical expert judgment, the standard pharmaceutical and research partners apply when evaluating data for research and regulatory use.

The company grew its data network 60x over the past year, spanning leading provider groups across neurology, nephrology, ophthalmology, respiratory, metabolic, and immunology. Multiple “Top 5” pharma companies are among its partners.

A wave of AI investment flowing into life sciences has created new demand for proprietary clinical data. As drug developers and AI researchers push into trial design, patient stratification, and therapeutic development, the publicly available datasets that powered earlier biomedical models have largely been exhausted. High-quality, structured real-world clinical records are now a scarce input, and Century Health’s provider network and abstraction infrastructure are positioned to fill this gap.

“Century Health is accelerating medical breakthroughs by unlocking real-world clinical data across the entire drug lifecycle, creating a win-win for providers and life sciences companies,” said Prashant Shukla, Partner at Origin Ventures. “Upstream, it’s the fuel for AI models driving discovery, disease modeling, and patient stratification; downstream, it’s the evidence needed to demonstrate safety and effectiveness, differentiate their drugs, and win payer negotiations.”

“Structuring clinical data historically required extensive manual work that can now be automated and scaled, creating unprecedented opportunity for healthcare data infrastructure. Century Health operates with the speed the life sciences industry needs and the clinical rigor it demands. This funding lets us expand our network, go deeper into priority disease areas, and generate the critical evidence that shapes patient care,” said Vish Srivastava, Co-Founder and CEO at Century Health.

Century Health is continuing to expand its disease-specific registry network, deepen pharma collaborations, and advance CHARM’s capabilities for complex abstraction and data harmonization.

The company’s vision is to make real-world clinical data usable and reliable for every researcher, provider, and life sciences partner that are working to shorten the path to discovery and better treatments for complex diseases.

About Century Health

Century Health is a health technology company transforming how real-world evidence is generated from clinical data. With its AI-powered platform, Century Health unlocks rich, high-quality datasets from fragmented and siloed clinical information to fuel groundbreaking research and industry collaborations. By automating data curation and enrichment, the platform eliminates manual data entry while upholding the highest standards of patient privacy. Partnering with leading academic institutions, healthcare providers, and life sciences organizations, Century Health accelerates medical breakthroughs with the power of AI. For more information, visit century.health.

Originally announced May 19th, 2026

< + > Strategies to Ensure Patients Have Secure and Meaningful Access to Their Health Data

The digitization of healthcare has created a lot of change, with none as clear as the changes that have happened with health data. Transferring between clinics is much easier, patient care is improving thanks to continuous monitoring and diagnostic accuracy, and organizations are increasing their operational efficiencies. People have also taken advantage of digital health data to monitor their own conditions. Personal health devices such as Apple Watches and Oura Rings have been on the rise, allowing people to track their heart rate, sleep patterns, and more, all in the interest of bettering their health.

However, there have also been some negative changes, the main one being privacy concerns. Healthcare is not the only aspect of people’s lives that has become digitized. People have seen their data in these other digital spaces being sold to other parties without their consent, and as such, trust isn’t always very high. This mistrust is only compounded by the rise of ransomware attacks that specifically target health data.

This puts healthcare organizations in a high-wire balancing act of making sure that health data is easily accessible to their patients to do with as they wish, while also keeping health data securely locked up to keep it from becoming a target for cybercriminals. To get a better understanding as to how to best stay on this wire, we reached out to our incredible Healthcare IT Today Community and asked — what strategies are organizations using to ensure patients have secure, meaningful access to their health data? Below are their responses.

DJ Tucker, Managing Director, Healthcare Informatics at Healthcare IT Leaders
Meaningful patient data access has to be built on three simultaneous layers: frictionless portals that remove the incentive for workarounds, digital literacy embedded directly in the care experience, and governance frameworks that ensure your EHR configurations meet both regulatory requirements and real human usability. Get any one of those wrong and you haven’t solved the problem, you’ve just moved it.

The stakes are higher than most realize. Interoperability is a patient safety strategy. Fragmented records don’t stay in the background; they surface at the bedside, at the most critical moments. Solving for meaningful data access means investing in the governance layer, the Oracle Health and Epic configurations, the identity frameworks, and the patient-facing literacy.

Matt Ernst, VP, Technical Operations and Support at Tendo
Access to health data has expanded significantly, but the next step is making that information meaningful and easier to access for patients. Health systems are increasingly focused on bringing together fragmented data from EHRs, care teams, and digital tools, so patients have a clearer understanding of their health and care plans.

Equally important is ensuring that access is secure and trusted. That requires strong interoperability standards, thoughtful data governance, and patient-centered design.

Ultimately, meaningful access means patients can not only view their information, but also use it to make informed decisions and stay connected with their care teams throughout their care journey.

Paul Wilder, Executive Director at CommonWell Health Alliance
Patients deserve secure, meaningful access to their healthcare data, and this reality relies on the adoption of Individual Access Services (IAS). IAS is the technical paradigm shift required to move beyond information from a single provider towards agnostic, seamless, accurate, and complete information.

By leveraging the highest levels of verification to confirm a patient’s identity, IAS can help ensure patients can securely view their information from any provider that has contributed to their care, no matter who they see or where they live.

Our call to action? The entire healthcare community should prioritize exchanges and apps that align with IAS standards for patient access to accurate, complete, and secure information.

Jonathan Burk, Software Engineering Director at Full Spectrum
There is no shortage of healthcare apps, ranging from fitness trackers to patient portals. But the real key to ensuring patients have the data they need is building open, API-first architectures based on zero-trust cybersecurity principles. Embracing openness prevents app overload. With too much information spread across too many sites or apps, patients will be less likely to engage, resulting in the consumption of less data, not more.

Niki Panich, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Penguin Ai
Meaningful access is more than a patient portal login. It is giving patients data they can actually understand and act on. The organizations doing this the best are pairing open APIs and FHIR-compliant infrastructure with plain-language summaries and care team follow-through. Security and usability are both key requirements. Patients engage with data they trust, and they build that trust by actually being able to use it.

Dr. Scott Schell, Chief Medical Officer at Cognizant
Health systems are increasingly using interoperable APIs and modern patient portals to provide individuals with easier access to their health records, test results, and care plans. At the same time, strong identity management, multifactor authentication, and zero-trust security frameworks are helping organizations balance accessibility with appropriate protection of sensitive health information.

Such great responses to consider here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

What strategies do you think organizations are using to ensure patients have secure and meaningful access to their health data? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!