I spent some time figuring out and getting a little help in uploading my health records to Claude, using HealthEx. I did the demo with Ruheed Mohamed, the head of technical services, and then I interviewed CEO Priyanka Agarwal, MD. This shows how Healthex gets data and incorporates it into Claude, and where Priyanka thinks the business is going, and why she wants to change the way consumers get health care data.–Matthew Holt

Transcript of Interview with Priayanka Aggarwall MD (2nd half of video. First half you need to watch!)

Matthew Holt: Hey, Matthew Holt, quick THCB, spotlight. And this is a bit of an adjunct to the, work I’ve been doing trying to figure out how the new, big LLMs like, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are now working their health angle and getting health records. And I’m very lucky to have with me Priyanka Agarwal. Priyanka is a, UCSF trained MD who is the CEO of HealthEx, which does what exactly, Priyanka?

Priyanka Aggarwal: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Matt. So HealthEx helps, individuals access and share their health records at the moments that matter in their health journey. I’m really excited about the year that we’ve had, the work that we’re doing, and the folks that we’re live with.

Matthew Holt: I know you’ve been at UCSF a while, but you’ve a relatively new company. I think you got founded just two years ago. Is that right?

Priyanka Aggarwal: HealthEx has been around for about four years, so-

Matthew Holt: Okay. and you got funded from, General Catalyst. When was that? You got a decent round.

Priyanka Aggarwal since the beginning, four years ago.

Matthew Holt: So, okay, so I’m a, I’m a little out of date. So couple of things. There are a lot of companies that have been doing this kind of thing, right? Getting data and bringing it together and using it for various purposes, and it’s never really taken off a, sort of, as an area. In fact, people have been doing personal health records since God knows when. I was in a personal health records company in 2000, so it’s – not a new idea. obviously the introduction of these massively now popular consumer LLMs, particularly the big three, Gemini, ChatGPT , and Claude, you know, changes the game a bit.

How did you get involved with, Anthropic, and what was the… How did, how did that come to… I mean, why, why did they choose you?

Priyanka Aggarwal: Well, just in terms of how I came to this space, so as a physician, I really lived a lot of the challenges both in my patients being able to access their health data and seeing all the delays that folks face in their everyday care when, you know, you’re waiting for biopsy results to start cancer treatment.

You have a complex patient admitted to the ICU, you don’t know what’s happened to them. so I lived a lot of those challenges, of course, as a physician, as a patient. I also, spent time in the life sciences trying to do research and, support patients with complex rare diseases and trying to do things like developing a patient registry to understand how folks are doing.

All of that was really difficult. And so I lived a lot of the challenges in accessing patient data and, you know, I think at the time, a lot of the focus, if you really look at the last 20 years of interoperability, it’s been on institutions, how do we figure out the rules between, health systems and different organizations?

And I think all of that work has been really important but, , I really kind of experienced that that missing link of the patient or the individual really, wasn’t there. And so thought that there was an opportunity to, really bring in the voice of the individual. It is, of course, our own health data.

And so giving folks that opportunity to access their health records, share it in the moments that matter in a myriad of interesting ways, I thought that that was an interesting opportunity. And I think the timing was good because if you look at some of the work that’s happened with patient access across TEFCA, across the CMS Align networks, I think there’s been- A lot of support at the federal level for this work.

And then, you know, as you called out, I think with LLMs and just the explosion of digital health apps, there’s of course many interesting ways for folks to use that data. not discounting, of course, the importance of sharing that data with your doctor or your health plan as well.

Matthew Holt: Yeah. And, speaking as somebody who’s right in the middle of that, and I’m actually gonna write this up as a separate thing for THCB readers, . It’s easier now to get the tech stuff. The images are, are still a struggle. Sharing images between different cardiologists at the moment is still an interesting thing. And there’s a lot of internal barriers within health systems. I wrote a piece about this in 2009 called Cats and Dogs, because cats like places and dogs like people, and we’re in a cat world for our health IT.

Still stuck in places, and moving it between places when you’re a person, is still tricky, and we kind of missed an opportunity I think back in 2009, 2010, ’11, ’12. But, that’s, that’s sort of water under the bridge, and now the LLMs are kind of giving us a new opportunity. So, let me ask you the question again. How did you get selected by Anthropic?

Priyanka Aggarwal: I was very interested in seeing the opportunity for companies like Anthropic and others to support individuals looking to better understand their health. We know that wait times to see doctors are continuing to increase.

There’s a tremendous need, for Americans to access healthcare in a more kind of timely manner. And so, certainly thought there was an opportunity for AI to support individuals. Of course, not to replace, their doctor in any way. And so, , I was able to meet with the Anthropic team last year. There was alignment in the vision and in the opportunity. And so I think, , a lot of the interest came together at the right time. We were also reaching maturity with, again, services like TEFCA and CMS. And so I think that shared vision, really, was, was additive, and the timing was right.

Matthew Holt: And you announced this actually, I think, back in, in January or the, or they announced it, you announced it, the combination. And to be honest, it kind of went a little under the radar because, Open AI announced something similar with B.Well. And they then didn’t… I think I was on their wait list.

I realized I could have got yours much earlier, I just hadn’t figured out where it was in the connector. But, but ignoring that for a second, kind of well done the the folks at ChatGPT Health for announcing that, you know, theirs was now open. I went and looked at theirs, did theirs, went, hang on, how is, how is doing Claude?

And that’s when I went through the process. So just on the nuts and bolts of how it works, currently somebody has to go into the settings and sort of activate the connector, I’m still a little puzzled by how you surface this for the individual consumers, ’cause there are already hundreds of millions of people on Claude, and maybe your other customers, I don’t know much about the others, but, figuring this out. But how does it work?

Priyanka Aggarwal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think different teams have made different decisions here. So as you said, within Claude, there’s a number of connectors that individuals can choose to turn on, and so HealthEx is one of those connectors and essentially the general idea is that, we want it to be really, a quick and seamless process. So the flow that we have modeled that lets individuals connect their health records is designed to feel, like a familiar flow, not too different from the way that you might connect your financial data, using Plaid or connect your Google Drive.

Of course, your health data is more sensitive, so there’s an added layer of security. But the idea is that when you click into the connector flow, you verify your identity, you consent, and then you decide what records you wanna pull in across all your providers. And then the process itself is relatively quick.

It should take most folks about five minutes or less. on the other side of it, the records are connected in almost real time and folks can start having conversations. And we’ve certainly invested a lot in making that flow user-friendly and ensuring that the data is connected in a really quick way.

Health records can be huge, and so we know in 2026, folks don’t wanna wait a couple of hours. They don’t wanna have to come back the next day. So we invested a lot in the data processing to make sure that the data was ready in a really timely manner.

Matthew Holt: And, and one more technicality. When you go into this, you get the choice of going in via Clear, which basically identifies that you are Matthew Holt and you’ve lived in these different places and- That, I believe, takes you down the path towards the end, the, the QHINs. They’re called QHINs these days, right? The actual- That’s right. Yeah … where, where you’re getting the data as if you were an institution without having to sign into the thing. Or you can go the way I did on the, on the little video which will be attached to this. That’s right. Yeah. So institution by institution, I just went to UCSF where I happen to have a ton of data at the moment and then I’m basically re-signing in, but now I guess some combination of, HealthEx, Fasten and Anthropic, depending on then you, you spend a little bit of this off the record.

Priyanka Aggarwal: That’s right. Yeah. And we’ve invested a lot in that flow being flexible, and so we basically let the user decide do they wanna so-called find their records automatically, and that is through IAL2 identity verification. We do that in partnership with CLEAR. And the benefit there is that we then find all of your records for you. And so if you’re somebody that has data at a lot of different places, you don’t remember all the names of the practices, that’s a really nice flow. If on the other hand, you know, and, and you called this out yourself, most of your data is at one institution, you know the login, you– maybe you don’t have your ID out for that ID verification, you can go through, just a, a more traditional FHIR endpoint flow.

And so we basically let our users decide, and we say, “Hey, do you want us to find your data for you? If so, you need to verify your identity, or do you wanna go through and find it yourself?” So the idea is that we wanna give folks kind of the right flow for them, and it’s gonna be different based on kind of you, your medical history, et cetera but we wanna basically put you into the right flow that’s gonna be the simplest for you.

Matthew Holt: Yeah, and I haven’t done the clear one. I did a similar one with a company called Pluto, which I’m adviser to a while back, and same sort of thing there. You could go and get it via the QHIN, and I don’t know which one they, were using at the time, but a lot of different data came from weird places, which, which I’d forgotten about

You know, the doctor’s visit in 2003 that you completely forgot about, but there it is. You know, that kind of thing. And, i actually will, before I publish this, go and do that version through, HealthEx and pull to see, see what else shows up.

Priyanka Aggarwal: Absolutely. Yeah. We’re, just one thing to mention. Yeah. We do match on historic addresses. Yeah. So it’s kind of fun because we might find an ER visit that, you know, you went to on vacation. For me, I end up with an urgent care visit I had in New York with an institution I never made a patient portal login. So it’s a nice way of getting, I would say, more complete records and not having to remember, all the clinic names, which can sound really similar sometimes.

Matthew Holt: So two last questions about, the relationship with Claude. So now the record’s there. So far all I’ve done is said, “Okay, hey, go find my report.” Now, props to you guys. I’ve asked the ChatGPT version of this would be well, , and said, “Hey, go find my report.”

And they could find the title of the report, but they couldn’t see into the report. Now, I’d actually already fed it, separate to ChatGPT, the actual text from the report. This was from, an angiogram I’d had recently, which amazingly don’t have heart disease despite being an obese, disgusting, , early 60s- quasi-American male who – eats too many cheeseburgers and has too many milkshakes. But anyway, I do have a valve defect, which is a separate issue, but genetic. Nothing I did. When I did this, on Claude, Claude could read the whole thing, and it came back and said, “Yes, you’ve got all this stuff going on.”

And I asked it, did, because I’d actually had previously fed a different chat the actual text of this, ’cause part of doing this I was just using Claude by copy and pasting into it. And it went, “No, no, this is, this is, that’s in another chat. I can’t see that one, but here’s what I’ve just read directly through using the bridge to HealthEx.”

So props to you guys. Now- Two questions. How much are you involved after that? I assume, and I haven’t done this yet, that at some point I will say to Claude, “Okay, figure out a way to give me all of my relevant health data in a record that’s not like a 2,000-word-long scroll chat.” There must be a, there must be a way they can format a health record for me.

I don’t know if they’ve done that. I don’t know if that is a part that you’re working on, or are you just the connection?

Priyanka Aggarwal: Yeah, no, we’ve, we’ve invested a lot in not just making the data available, but in serving it up in a way that we say is gonna be fast, efficient, and accurate.

So the thing is, health records are huge, as you know, and if you don’t do some processing, and if you don’t point the AI to the right portion of the record, you can run out of context window space after a question or two. It can be really slow in getting your answers. So the way that we’re serving up the data to Claude is through the MCP architecture.And so essentially, as you ask questions, we point Claude to the right portion of your record. These are a list of tools, and you might have noticed that you had to consent to each one as you were going through-… kind of the chat. And so that offers really nice privacy as well. So let’s say you just wanna ask about your medications, but you don’t want Claude to read your notes, you can then allow Claude to see portions of your record and not your entire record.

If you did wanna ask Claude for a visual summary, there’s a summary tool that we’ve built. And so, there is work that we’ve done to ensure that, A, you’re getting answers quickly, the answers are accurate, and the answers are also served up in a way that are gonna be, really making sense. And so that work is all through the MCP, and we’ve certainly invested a lot as a team. Anthropic is using the MCP. We have other folks in the AI space that are also using a similar architecture.

Matthew Holt: So this is essentially AI equivalent of APIs essentially to be able to, focus more on the right part. That’s right. And then, so you are kind of both doing the connection, but also building stuff within and in conjunction with Claude and Anthropic, and that’s, so that’s, super interesting.

I’m always trying to figure out how they’re, you know, working with other people to figure this out, and when does the, when does the, AGI get so smart it doesn’t need anybody else and doesn’t need us? But, that’s a separate topic.So, the business of, of HealthEx. That’s a great marquee, visibility with Claude.- You’ve announced a few other clients, but go back to where I started. A lot of people have tried this sort of, can we gather data together for consumers? It hasn’t ever really worked. As I mentioned, I was doing it 26 years ago. You know, I’m still not on my yacht. So, when you look at the, the business goals, where do you think you’re gonna get paid for doing this?

Priyanka Aggarwal: I mean, I think we’re in a really interesting moment for US healthcare. And again, you know, I think so much of the focus for the last 20 years has been on institutions. I think we’re in this interesting moment of consumer-driven healthcare where, you know, you do have services like ChatGPT, you have a lot of companies that are working directly with consumers. And I think people are really interested in managing their health, and they really have the tools to do so.

So maybe 10 years ago you could get the data, but you couldn’t do that much with it. And so now I think we’re in this moment where you have platforms like Claude, like Copilot Health, Whoop, and others, where, having that context on your health history is really meaningful. And so that to me is a lot of why I think the timing is really great right now, why this work is really important. I think people really do wanna manage their health, and doing that really starts with having your personal history with you ready to use, you know, with your doctor, with different AI platforms, with digital health apps. So, that to me is a little bit of why this is an – interesting moment, it’s an important moment, and where I think, you know, the hope is that we’re, finally gonna reach that point in time where people really do expect this.

You might have seen, Matt, that we launched what we call our HealthEx Wallet earlier this week. A lot of what we were hearing from patients and users is, “You know, I was able to connect my records with Copilot or Whoop or Claude, but I also wanna just see that data.” And so anybody that goes through our connector flow with, any of our partners, they can choose to return to HealthEx, they can see their data laid out in a timeline.

They can generate a QR code to share it with their doctor. So I think the hope is that people really see value in the work that we’re doing, they can use their data in really interesting ways, and that folks are really engaged in their health in a way that maybe they weren’t a few years ago.

Matthew Holt: And as a business, does that mean there might be a consumer business coming of this, do you think, DTC? Or you predominantly think you’re gonna be a business-to-business server

Priyanka Aggarwal: Our predominant model today is enterprises paying us. We wanna serve consumers in any way that we can, and so the wallet is just an effort to serve users. And, I think a big part of what we’re doing is founded on transparency and trust, so we want folks to know that, “Hey, I shared my data with Claude or with Copilot.” And so we also wanna make it really easy to turn off those connections. So folks can, of course, do that within Claude. They can also do that within HealthEx. So part of it is just making sure that we’re serving the user first party as well.

Matthew Holt: Yeah, Obviously, there’s a lot of back and forth about privacy and this, that, and the other. But I think that, the, key that I’ve, certainly since I’ve had my health issues and have been using these, as a user rather than observer, is that the value is very, very strong for my 20 bucks a month from Claude, I’m really getting a lot of help with the stuff that is just going around the doctor’s visits. And we know that even at the best of times, the health system is stressed, and at the worst of times it is very unresponsive. I won’t name, won’t name names, although I – I have and I will in the future here. But, so I think that the ability to make these LLMs and consumer tools easier for people to use and get more accurate data is, is just a great thing.

Priyanka Aggarwal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think- we also really want folks to have good information. So that’s my feeling as a physician, is these services aren’t meant to replace your doctor, but if they can help you as a patient be a lot more informed, be more prepared for when you see your doctor, that’s really the best outcome.

And I think we are hearing from folks that try these services that, “Wow, you know, I get so many labs with every chemotherapy visit. This is the first time I’ve really understood what those labs mean.” So that’s the type of feedback that we’re getting, and I think that’s really kind of the best outcome here.

Matthew Holt: Fantastic. Well, I’m looking forward to watching as this whole area and HealthEx, continues to grow and see how this impacts patient care in the health system. I’ve been talking with Priyanka Agarwal, MD. She is the CEO of HealthEx. Priyanka, thanks for your time today.

Priyanka Aggarwal: Thanks so much for having me, Matt, and thank you for trying out HealthEx.

Matthew Holt: Of course, I try all the stuff out. Everyone knows that. Usually it’s trouble.