b.well partners with Samsung Health and Clear to make healthcare data more accessible and secure

Health tech company b.well Connected Health is working with both a major health platform and a biometric identity verification provider to help consumers access their health information more seamlessly and securely.

The company, which moved its headquarters to south Baltimore’s historically Black Sharp-Leadenhall neighborhood in March, recently announced both a partnership with Samsung Health and an integration with the secure identity company Clear.

According to CEO Kristen Valdes, who founded b.well in 2015, the partnership with Samsung Health aims to change how consumers manage their health, particularly their interactions with healthcare solutions and services. This collaboration would result in a “shoppable marketplace” through which consumers can find information on different providers.

“Samsung is allowing us to, in our partnership for the first time, put all kinds of providers together into a shoppable marketplace so that consumers can more easily search for care across different providers, where today you would need to go to that provider’s website or mobile application in order to access their services,” Valdes told Technical.ly.

“It’s about meeting people where they are and providing easier access to care, right on their mobile devices,” she added.

As for the work with Clear, b.well will be enacting what’s known as Identity Assurance Level 2, which Valdes said allows consumers to apply the same secure login across several access points.

“So a user can log in one time with a trusted token and they can log into multiple areas to access their data, multiple areas to access care, and they can simply use the same login,” Valdes said. “Which is more secure than what healthcare has been.”

These partnerships’ foci dovetail with Valdes’ personal motivation for founding b.well in the first place: Her child, who deals with several medical conditions, “has 27 patient portals” replete with issues.

“None of them are accurate. None of them talk to each other,” she said. “And in order to get her longitudinal record, which is what she needs in order to share with physicians moving forward, she would need to log in 27 places and consolidate all that data. So that’s the problem that the b.well solves for now.”

With rollouts for the new partnerships scheduled for throughout 2024, Valdes pointed out that with its new partnerships, b.well users will be able to receive recommendations, book or coordinate care on their devices without logging in and out of multiple applications.

“Making healthcare easier to navigate will help improve health outcomes because it’s not just making it easier so that there’s not so much fragmentation and difficulty in finding a doctor or availability or care when you need it.”

“Consumers should have the basic right to have access to all of their healthcare data,” she added.