Patient Data Access for Digital Health Companies: Three Conference Takeaways

Over the past three weeks, our team has been at Becker’s, Civitas, and Health Datapalooza. Across those conversations, we kept coming back to the same question: as healthcare products take on more of the patient experience, how do they get the clinical history needed to do that work?

Three points stood out.

Personalization at scale requires a data-access layer underneath it

Personalization came up at every conference. So did the infrastructure needed to support it across the patient experience. It’s harder to account for a medication change, a recent hospital visit, or care delivered somewhere else without access to that patient’s broader clinical history. Patient-entered information can personalize an app, but longitudinal patient records add clinical context from across care settings.

That distinction matters as technology takes a larger role in care delivery. CMS’s ACCESS Model, which began in July 2026, brings technology-supported chronic care into Original Medicare. More than 160 organizations are participating. For teams building these tools, personalization increasingly depends on access to longitudinal patient records, not just the information collected inside the product.

Network growth is not the same thing as product-level access

Significantly more health information moves through national exchange infrastructure than it did even a year ago. TEFCA data exchange grew from roughly 10 million documents exchanged before 2025 to more than 1.7 billion today, with more than 23,000 organizations live across the network.

But network growth doesn’t eliminate the data-access challenge for companies building healthcare products. More information moving across more organizations doesn’t mean a product can easily find where a patient’s records live, retrieve them across sources, normalize the information, and put it to use. We saw a similar gap between growing networks and usable records in our HIMSS26 takeaways.

The data you need on day one may not be the data you need to scale

Many health-tech products start with a contained use case and a contained set of data. But as the product expands, so does the information it needs. A care-navigation product may need to know which specialists a patient has already seen. A virtual-care platform may need context from an in-person encounter. A clinical-trial platform may need years of diagnostic and treatment history.

That makes data access an infrastructure decision. External clinical data may not be essential to a product’s first version. But as teams add use cases, populations, and workflows, they need a way to access a broader patient history.

The goal isn't to predict every data need on day one. It's to ensure accessing that data doesn't become a roadblock when the product is ready for it.

How GetPatientRecords Helps

Product teams shouldn’t have to become interoperability teams to access the patient records their products need.

GetPatientRecords provides one API to access patient records nationwide, connecting across QHINs, EHRs, HIEs, and other data sources. We handle the complexity of finding and retrieving patient data so your team can stay focused on the product you’re building.