She left the certainty of the exam room to chase a stranger idea: that the patient, not the hospital, should hold the keys to their own medical records.
Open the apps on your phone and you can see, in a tap, who has access to your camera, your location, your contacts - and switch any of it off. Try to do the same with your medical records and you fall into a paper-and-fax abyss. Priyanka Agarwal noticed the gap, decided it was absurd, and built HealthEx to close it.
HealthEx is an AI-powered patient consent and data-rights platform. It lets people grant, view, share, and revoke access to their comprehensive health records - and it gives hospitals the machinery to honor those choices without drowning in compliance overhead. The phrase the company keeps returning to is deceptively small: 1-click revocations. The plumbing behind it is not small at all.
She started it in 2022. By late 2024 it had $14M led by General Catalyst with Electric Capital alongside. The product speaks the unglamorous dialects of health data - FHIR, CCDA, TEFCA, HIPAA - and turns them into something a patient can actually use.
"Patients are ultimately partners in their care. They should be driving their care."
The clever move is regulatory, not just technical. TEFCA - the federal framework for health data exchange - gives HealthEx a single common agreement that reaches an enormous footprint of providers. As Agarwal puts it, that one agreement connects to "almost 1,500 hospitals and 34,000 clinics using Epic." Instead of negotiating a thousand integrations, the patient gets a doorway into nearly all of them at once.
That is the difference between a feature and infrastructure. HealthEx has turned on patient-directed access with Epic, teamed up with CLEAR and athenahealth on identity and access, and joined the CMS patient-centric health tech ecosystem. The bet is that consent is not a checkbox at the end of a workflow - it is the layer everything else should sit on.
AI agents help clinical staff generate consents for different uses across the care journey - cutting the manual paperwork.
Patients access, share, and revoke access to records in formats compatible with HL7 Consent FHIR standards.
Administrators programmatically enforce granular, patient-set preferences with immutable audit logs.
Most founders pick a lane. Agarwal collected them. Her path runs through development economics - field research connected to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and work at the World Bank - then into clinical medicine, then into the venture world at Rock Health, then into pharma as Director of Digital Health at MyoKardia, where she worked on AI for cardiovascular disease before Bristol Myers Squibb acquired it.
And she never fully left the clinic. She is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF and the health system's Physician Lead for Telehealth - meaning she runs a startup while still seeing the people her software is built to protect. The customer is not an abstraction. The customer is in her appointment book.
"This notion of trust and patient empowerment is really central to the effort."
In 2025 HealthEx announced a strategic collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center to build tools that streamline patient consent and give patients direct control over data access. For an institution whose entire relationship with patients runs on trust during the most frightening moments of their lives, that is a meaningful vote of confidence in a three-year-old company.
Agarwal frames it as the whole thesis in miniature: give the organizations that already care deeply about the patient relationship the tools to prove it. The technology is the easy part to describe. The hard part - and the point - is the trust it is meant to carry.
"How do we give them the tools to really build that trust and build that relationship? That's fundamental to this effort. And AI really supports that."
"HealthEx is now one of the first platforms to make it possible for individuals to access, share and view their comprehensive health records - with any trusted third party."
"We give patients more control over their healthcare decisions and create a more transparent process."
"TEFCA helps us connect with almost 1,500 hospitals and 34,000 clinics using Epic through one common agreement."