Consumer-Authenticated Health Data Infrastructure
Brendan Keeler, Senior PM at Zus Health, on building infrastructure for digital health
This claim matters because it separates two very different healthcare data businesses that often get lumped together. Consumer authenticated pulling is a patient logging into a portal, approving access, and letting an app copy records out, which is closest to Plaid’s model of using the user’s credentials to unlock an existing account. Zus is positioning that as a basic input, then building workflow software and a unified patient record on top for digital health providers.
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The Plaid like category in healthcare is built around patient permission, not hospital IT procurement. Human API, OneRecord, and 1up were grouped together because they let a patient authenticate into a portal and pull records into a third party app, which fits consumer apps, wellness products, and non-HIPAA use cases like life insurance underwriting.
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A separate category sells to software vendors and provider organizations that need persistent integrations into many hospitals. Redox, Lyniate, and NexHealth help a company connect once and then work across dozens of health systems, while Particle, Health Gorilla, and Kno2 wrap older healthcare networks in easier APIs for provider workflows.
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The reason this became possible is regulation and standards. The interview points to FHIR and federal pressure making data access much easier than five or ten years ago, and CMS says patient access APIs must follow the ONC Cures Act technical standards. ONC later reported that more than two thirds of hospitals were using FHIR APIs for patient access in 2022.
The market is heading toward consumer authenticated access becoming infrastructure, not the product. As patient portal based retrieval spreads, the winning companies will be the ones that turn raw records into something operationally useful, which in Zus’s case means cleaner patient context, care team workflows, and software that helps virtual care groups run day to day care on top of the data.