HealthEx

A patient opens an app and, for once, their whole medical history shows up.

Picture the moment HealthEx was built for. A Medicare patient just had cataract surgery. Five providers were involved. Each one holds a slice of the record, and none of them talk to each other. The patient pulls out a phone, verifies who they are, taps a button, and the records arrive - in real time, from every system at once. No fax. No release form mailed to a basement. No three-week wait.

That is HealthEx in 2026: a San Francisco company that turned the dullest sentence in healthcare - "please sign the consent form" - into a working network. It connects patients to roughly 80% of U.S. care providers, verifies their identity through CLEAR, and moves their data under TEFCA, the federal interoperability framework most people have never heard of and never needed to. Patients get an Apple-Wallet-style view of their health. Health systems get consent they can actually enforce.

It is a quietly radical pitch. Healthcare has spent two decades promising that data would follow the patient. HealthEx is one of the first to make it happen without asking the patient to understand a single acronym.

Consent was treated like a signature. It is actually the whole system.

Here is the uncomfortable truth the founders started with: in American healthcare, your data moves freely between institutions and almost never to you. The consent form - the thing that supposedly protects you - is a one-time, one-dimensional checkbox, scanned and forgotten. Once you sign, you lose track of where your information goes, who reads it, and how to take it back.

Meanwhile, every health system drowns in the inverse problem. They are legally responsible for honoring patient preferences they cannot see, enforce, or audit at scale. Compliance teams review consents by hand. Granular permissions - share this with my cardiologist but not my employer's wellness app - simply do not exist in most workflows.

So you get the worst of both worlds: patients with no control and institutions with no enforcement. The data flows; the trust does not. That gap - between what the law promises and what the clipboard delivers - is the tension HealthEx exists to close. Everything the company builds is a different answer to the same question: who actually decides where your health data goes?

A physician and a video-call engineer walked into healthcare's messiest problem.

The pairing is the strategy. Priyanka Agarwal is an MD with an MBA who practiced and worked in life sciences at UCSF and MyoKardia (acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb). She had seen, from inside the clinic, that the hardest problem in medicine was often not the diagnosis - it was the paperwork following the patient. Anand Raghavan spent his career building systems that move sensitive things at scale: he was on the founding team and VP of Engineering at BlueJeans, the video platform Verizon bought, after stints at Microsoft and Yahoo.

One spent years inside the system the other had only read about. That is roughly the right ratio for fixing it.

Their bet, placed in October 2024: consent should be a platform, not a piece of paper. Investors agreed. HealthEx launched with $14M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst, with participation from Electric Capital - an unusually large opening hand for a company whose product was, on paper, "permission."

Four pieces that turn "sign here" into something you can revoke at any time.

HealthEx took consent apart and rebuilt it as software. The result is less a single app than a layer that sits between patients, providers, and the data itself.

The detail that makes skeptics pause: the one-click revocation. Most "patient empowerment" tools let you grant access beautifully and take it back never. HealthEx treats revocation as a first-class action, logged and enforced, not a customer-service ticket.

A stack of acronyms only a regulator could love - assembled so the patient never has to learn a single one of them.

From launch to live network in under a year.

Reach, partners, and the numbers that make the argument.

A consent layer is only as useful as the network it can reach. This is where HealthEx earns the skepticism back. The company did not try to replace the existing health-data infrastructure - it wired itself into it.

Numbers HealthEx cites publicly. The reachability figures ride on TEFCA and Epic, not on HealthEx going hospital by hospital.

The company it keeps

Make patient consent and preferences travel with the patient. Everywhere.

Strip away the acronyms and HealthEx wants one thing: for your consent to follow you the way your data already does. The company frames it as unifying health records across providers so individuals can own their health journey - and as complementing, not competing with, national interoperability efforts like TEFCA's individual access services.

It is a deliberately unglamorous mission. There is no cure here, no diagnostic breakthrough. There is a checkbox, re-imagined as infrastructure. But the founders argue that the checkbox is exactly where trust in healthcare is won or lost - and that without it, every shiny health-AI tool is just another stranger reading your chart without asking.

The AI era runs on your records. Someone has to hold the keys.

Here is the part that makes HealthEx more than a compliance tool. The next decade of healthcare assumes AI agents reading your full medical history - co-pilots, assistants, diagnostic models. That only works if there is a trustworthy way to grant and revoke access. A consent layer is not a nice-to-have in that world; it is the thing standing between "your data working for you" and "your data working for everyone but you."

HealthEx is betting it can be that layer - the place where a patient decides, in one tap, which human or machine gets to see what, and changes their mind whenever they like. Whether it wins is an open question. The interoperability graveyard is full of well-funded companies that solved the technology and never earned the trust.

But return to that cataract patient for a second. The one juggling five providers after surgery, trying to keep their medications straight. Before HealthEx, coordinating that care meant phone trees, fax machines, and hope. Now it means a phone, a verified identity, and a single tap that says: yes, this is mine, send it to me. The records show up. The patient stays in control. And the consent form - that forgotten scrap of paper - finally does the job it was always supposed to do.

The whole company, in one gesture: arms up, records portable, permission firmly in the patient's hands.