Datavant is partnering with identity verification company ID.me to help patients request their medical records faster and more easily via simple digital credentials.
By integrating ID.me's digital identity verification into Datavant's patient request tool, the companies aim to reduce friction, speed up access to records and strengthen safeguards against unauthorized access.
ID.me is a secure, private digital identity platform that acts as an independent "identity wallet." Twenty-three federal agencies, 50 state government agencies and more than 100 healthcare organizations use ID.me for secure identity verification and the company boasts more than 175 million users.
Datavant offers a data exchange network that connects more than 80,000 hospitals and clinics, 75% of the 100 largest health systems and an ecosystem of 350-plus real-world data partners. Its platform connects datasets across electronic health records, claims, specialty pharmacy, registries, imaging, labs and social determinants of health. Datavant's data collaboration platform enables more than 60 million healthcare records to move between thousands of organizations.
"We are deep believers that patients should not have to choose between convenient access and secure access to their health information," Alya Sulaiman, Datavant's chief privacy officer and SVP, deputy general counsel, AI, product and regulatory affairs, told Fierce Healthcare.
"Integrating a digital identity that can make verification faster, while also strengthening protection against fraudulent requesters or unauthorized disclosures, and give our healthcare organization provider customers a more consistent and auditable process for validating patient identity is just a huge win," Sulaiman said. "I love the idea of the digital identity verification process that all of us experience in so many different parts of our lives finally applying to healthcare to reduce friction and give providers greater confidence that records are reaching the right person."
Datavant’s patient request tool already enables individuals to request and receive their medical records electronically through a streamlined digital workflow, and the company will integrate ID.me's identity verification reusable digital credential into the front end of that tool, Sulaiman said.
Datavant and ID.me’s partnership brings a more standardized approach to identity verification into the patient request workflow, the companies said. The integration of ID.me will help healthcare organizations ensure patients get their medical records faster with an easier digital path and reduce friction with manual identity review. It will also strengthen auditability and transparency across the authentication process and streamline request fulfillment workflows for provider staff, according to the companies.
"Digital identity works best when people can reuse a credential that’s both portable and secure," said Wes Turbeville, senior vice president of federal and healthcare at ID.me, in a statement "Approximately 73% of patients using ID.me through Datavant’s patient request tool are already credentialed. This means they can use an existing account instead of creating a new one. By bringing that capability into Datavant’s patient request tool, we will help patients get their medical records with less friction, while still ensuring the highest standard of security."
ID.me's technology meets the federal standards for consumer authentication set by the Commerce Department and is approved as a NIST 800-63 IAL2 / AAL2 credential service provider by the Kantara Initiative.
"It's just a reality of offering digital front doors and patient access in 2026 that folks expect a digital pathway for accessing and directing the movement of their health information. We have found that many patients already have these credentials and use them both in healthcare and outside of healthcare. There's real benefit in introducing this widely adopted digital credential on the front end for a tool like the patient request tool because it means fewer manual steps at the identity verification stage for the patient," Sulaiman said.
"Identity is an important layer of interoperability and an enabler of interoperability. This is consistent with what you're seeing across the industry, which is more consistency and standardization and the ability to validate that people are who they say they are to facilitate interoperable health data movement," she noted.
The integration advances Datavant’s continued investment in modernizing patient access. Last year, the company unveiled a collaboration with athenahealth to automate medical record requests for providers at scale and simplify data sharing across organizations. Through the partnership, athenahealth's 170,000 ambulatory care providers will have secure access to high-quality patient records without leaving their workflow, the companies said.
In August, the company launched a digital-first retrieval platform aimed at helping healthcare organizations manage medical records.
"I think the sky's the limit with respect to use cases or context of use that digital identity could support," she said, while noting that identity verification is only one part of the medical records release process. Healthcare organizations must also evaluate the legal validity of requests, apply federal and state privacy requirements, determine who is authorized to receive information and ensure records are disclosed securely and appropriately.
Datavant plans to track how the integration with ID.me improves patient access to medical records.
"We are definitely going to be tracking adoption, but also are we seeing reductions in manual review?" she said. The goal is to shorten the time between when a records request is submitted and when the records are delivered. Datavant aims to reduce friction for patients while giving healthcare providers confidence that requests are being handled in a secure, verified and compliant manner, she noted.