When I was practicing medicine at UCSF, I cared for patients who sometimes drove five hours each way for a twenty-minute visit. Whole families would make the trip, leaving before dawn, spending the day on the road, to see a specialist who wasn’t available closer to home. I carried a lot of empathy for what that journey cost them.

But the hardest part of their care often wasn’t the visit itself. It was everything around it. Coordinating between the specialists they saw at UCSF and the providers in their own communities, with records scattered across systems that didn’t talk to each other. As their physician, I’d piece a patient’s history together as best I could, and lean on the patient and their family to fill the gaps: the labs from the hospital two towns over, the medication a local doctor had started, the specialist visit from a year ago.

More often than not, the most complete record of a patient’s health wasn’t in any chart. It was the patient.

That is a heavy thing to ask of anyone. It’s heavier still when you live far from care. I built HealthEx to lift that burden.

A shift that isn’t reaching everyone

Across the country, the health system is slowly reorganizing itself around the individual. But that progress is arriving unevenly, and for rural Americans the distance to care is widening, not closing. Hospitals are closing. Clinics are short-staffed. A single appointment can still mean a long drive from home.

People rise to meet that reality. In my experience, patients who live far from care are often the most engaged in it, because they have to be. They keep track of their own history, ask sharp questions, and make real decisions about their health between visits, because there isn’t always a clinician a few minutes away to turn to. That initiative is one of the most underappreciated strengths in rural health.

What’s missing isn’t effort. It’s that all that engagement happens without the person’s own information at hand. Someone can be doing everything right, paying attention, asking the right questions, seeking out good information, and still be working from memory, because their labs, medications, and history are scattered across every place they’ve ever been seen. The quieter cost of fragmented records isn’t only that a distant specialist can’t see what a local provider did. It’s that the person doing the most work to stay healthy is doing it without their own full story in front of them.

Extending the reach of better care

Today I’m proud to share two partnerships that bring HealthEx to more of the people who need it most.

With Sharecare, we’re bringing people’s clinical context into AskMD, its next-generation health navigation experience. From rural to urban settings, too many people have their health history scattered across every place they’ve received care. When someone chooses to bring in their records, HealthEx assembles them on the person’s terms, so AskMD’s guidance is grounded in their whole health, not a fragment of it.

With Thrive Mobile, the first wireless provider built for underserved Americans, we’re serving the people the system reaches last. Thrive gives each member a smartphone with HealthEx built in, so record access lives inside the experience they already have, no separate app to find or download. For someone who may not even know they have a right to their records, that replaces the old clipboard ritual with a health history that’s simply there when care happens.

Neither partnership replaces a clinician or removes every barrier people face. What they do is put people’s own full story back in front of them, and bring quality care within reach for those who’ve had the hardest time accessing it. Each new partnership brings us closer to a country where quality care reaches everyone.

Control comes first

Nothing we hold is more personal than our own health information, and any tool that asks people to share it has to earn that trust before anything else. At HealthEx, we didn’t add control on top of the product. We started there.

The person begins each connection, chooses what to share, and can review or revoke access at any time, with every action grounded in verified identity and explicit consent. This matters everywhere, and it matters especially for communities that have had good reason to be cautious about who gets access to their information. Trust is earned by giving people the controls and honoring them.

What I keep picturing

I keep picturing what this looks like for the patients I used to watch make that five-hour drive.

I think about someone at home late at night, worried about new test results, who can ask a real question and get an answer shaped by their actual medications and history, not a generic list of possibilities. I think about the person weighing whether that symptom is even worth a day-long round trip to the nearest specialist, who can finally make that call with their own record in front of them instead of guessing. And I think about the patient who does make the long drive, walking into the appointment already on the same page as the specialist, so the twenty minutes they get are spent on what matters, not on rebuilding a history from memory.

None of these people should have to be experts in their own fragmented records to get good care. Where they live shouldn’t decide whether their health history shows up when they need it.

That future is no longer far off. What was missing was never effort or technology, it was a way to put a person’s own records in their own hands, wherever they live. That part is finally being built. And with partners like Sharecare bringing it to the people who’ve had the hardest time getting care, it’s arriving where it’s needed most. We’re proud to help power that, and proud it’s reaching the people who’ve waited longest for it.