Datavant Acquires Swellbox to Transform How Patients Access Their Own Medical Data

• More than 100 health systems use Swellbox to enable patients to request their medical records seamlessly
• Ciox will offer Swellbox technology to 15,000 sites across health systems using its Release of Information services to streamline patient access to medical records
• Swellbox also enables patient authorization for record retrieval for clinical trial recruitment, long-term surveillance, registry creation, and other use cases

Patients have a wide range of reasons to request their own medical records. To share with their doctors. To use for their insurance or other benefits. Or for their own information. Although this is their legal right, and providers want to give them access to this information, it is often highly cumbersome and time-consuming.

At Datavant, we believe helping patients access their medical records is an important step towards making healthcare more accessible. Through Ciox, a division of Datavant, we offer Release of Information Services designed to streamline this process. I am proud to say that, in 2022, we helped fulfill patients’ requests for nearly 2 million medical records from the health systems we serve. For some of those requests, health systems utilized a fully-digital request workflow, and the experience was exceptional: “incredibly easy to use and amazingly fast,” according to a patient from UI Health. The secret was in an innovative application we make directly available to patients.

Today we are announcing the acquisition of Swellbox, the company behind the patient request tool that one patient called “by far the easiest requesting experience I’ve ever had.” Combining Swellbox’s technology and partnerships with Datavant’s Switchboard platform dramatically improves the way patients can access their own healthcare information. On our mission to connect the world’s health data, patients are at the center of our vision for the future.

When we announced the Datavant Switchboard earlier this year, we demonstrated how our platform automates the release of information, ensures compliance for providers, and creates seamless connectivity for data requesters. Since then, we continue to deploy our platform rapidly in providers across the US, adding new value for providers and data requesters with each deployment. In 2022, Datavant retrieved more than 60 million medical records, and quadrupled the number of those that could be retrieved digitally.

We are dedicated to helping health systems provide patients with access to their vital medical information as quickly and securely as possible.  As the CEO of Datavant, I’m thrilled to welcome the Swellbox team to help make the process of requesting medical records seamless for patients.

The  Swellbox founder and CEO, Brian Korb, shares this vision. His words channel our shared excitement: “Since starting Swellbox, it’s always been about improving patient access to, and control of, their health records.  Now that we’re joining forces with Datavant we’re thrilled to be able to achieve this impact at a much greater scale, providing an even more comprehensive set of solutions to help healthcare companies improve patient experience and satisfaction to what it should be.  It’s been a fun road getting to this point on our own but we know with Datavant we’ll go further together, unlocking the potential of patient data and ultimately improving outcomes.  We’re excited for what’s to come.”

Our customers not only give their patients an end-to-end digital process for requesting and receiving their medical records, they also dramatically reduce wait times leading to a much better patient experience. Together, we are excited to bring even more innovations forward, including expanding patient participation in research and clinical trials in the near future.