We have made enormous progress giving people digital access to their health information.
We have also managed to create a new problem: now you have to remember where all of it is.
Your primary-care provider may have one portal. A specialist may have another. The hospital has one. Your laboratory has one. Your insurance company has one. Your pharmacy may have one too. Every system can technically say, “You have access,” while the individual is still responsible for assembling the picture.
That is not the same thing as having usable access.
The numbers show both the progress and the problem
Federal data published by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT show just how much patient access has changed. In 2014, 25% of people were offered and accessed an online medical record or patient portal. By 2024, that figure had risen to 65%. App-based access increased from 38% in 2020 to 57% in 2024.
Those are good numbers.
Then comes the part that interests me: in 2024, 59% of people had multiple online medical records or patient portals, but only 7% used an app that combined information from different portals into one place.
That gap is the opportunity.
More portals are not the same thing as better access
I do not think the answer to fragmentation is another portal.
The person should not need to know which organization owns which piece of information before asking a simple question. If the data are legitimately available to the individual, the technology should do more of the organizational work in the background.
Healthcare policy and standards are already moving in that direction. CMS requires impacted payers to make claims, encounter data, and clinical data they maintain available through FHIR-based Patient Access APIs. Those APIs are specifically designed so a patient can authorize a third-party application of their choosing to access the information.
FHIR is not the exciting part. FHIR is plumbing. Good plumbing matters, but nobody wakes up excited because the pipes in the wall are standardized.
The experience built on top of that plumbing is what people actually feel.
A connected front door
Imagine asking one accessible interface, “What changed in my health record this week?” The useful experience is not six logins and six browser tabs. It is a clear answer that can point back to the original source when the person wants more detail.
Or imagine asking, “What is my next appointment?” without remembering whether the appointment lives in a VA system, hospital portal, specialist portal, or calendar integration.
That is the direction I mean when I talk about LivSoloConnect™.
It is not about pretending every healthcare system will suddenly become one database. It is about creating a more approachable connection layer over systems that are already becoming interoperable.
Voice can become the front door
This connects directly to the digital-fingertip idea. A touchscreen user taps an app, finds a menu, selects a record, and opens it. Voice access should be capable of accomplishing the same intent without requiring the person to physically work through the interface.
“Show my latest lab results.” “When is my next appointment?” “What medications changed?” “Send this result to the person helping me manage my care.”
That does not eliminate screens or portals. It gives the person another way into them.
Access should create engagement, not another chore
A systematic review of patient access to electronic health records found positive associations with several dimensions of healthcare engagement, including self-management, involvement, communication, and satisfaction. That does not mean every portal automatically improves care. It means access can be valuable when the experience is useful enough for people to engage with it.
The next generation of connected health technology should not measure success by the number of portals created. It should measure success by how easily a person can understand, use, and act on their own information.
That is a much higher bar. It is also a much more interesting problem.
Explore LivSoloConnect™ and the idea of a simpler connection between people and the services that support them.