Applications like Apple Health, Google Health, ChatGPT Health, and the dozens of AI wellness apps now entering the market can only access your medical records through one mechanism: patient-mediated exchange. This means you, the patient, must manually connect each of your healthcare providers’ patient portals, authorize access, and push your data to the application. The process is cumbersome, incomplete, and structurally limited in ways that matter to your health.
Consider what patient-mediated exchange actually captures. It reaches only providers where you have an active patient portal account. It retrieves only records those providers have chosen to make available through their portal interface. It handles only data in electronic formats that conform to modern interoperability standards. And it covers only providers you remember seeing.
Now consider what patient-mediated exchange misses. The imaging center you visited once in 2019 and forgot about. The urgent care clinic from a trip to another state where you paid cash. The specialist who retired and transferred your records to an archive facility. The hospital that still runs a legacy system not connected to consumer APIs. The surgical notes from fifteen years ago sitting in a paper file. The lab results from a provider whose patient portal you never activated. The records from any provider still using fax machines, which in American healthcare is more common than you might expect.
The result is a fragmented, incomplete picture of your health. Consumer applications will analyze whatever you give them and produce hallucinated insights based on partial information.
Modulus is a licensed medical practice. Under federal law, we are a HIPAA Covered Entity with a treatment relationship with our patients. This legal status grants us access to health information networks that consumer applications cannot join.
Specifically, Modulus participates in Carequality and TEFCA, the two national frameworks that enable provider-to-provider health information exchange across the United States. These networks were established under the 21st Century Cures Act to ensure that medical records can follow patients wherever they receive care. Through these networks, we can query your medical history directly from other healthcare providers. We do not need you to push anything. We do not need you to remember every provider you have seen. We do not need you to connect patient portals one by one.
When you become a Modulus patient, we query the network on your behalf. Records flow directly from other providers to us, legally and securely, for the purpose of your treatment.
No consumer application, regardless of how sophisticated its AI or how large its funding round, can legally query the national health information networks for your complete medical history.
Apple cannot do this. They are not a healthcare provider.
Google cannot do this. They are not a healthcare provider.
OpenAI and ChatGPT Health cannot do this. They are not healthcare providers.
Anthropic cannot do this. They are not a healthcare provider.
The biomarker testing companies cannot do this. They are laboratories, not treating providers with query rights.
The AI health & wellness apps flooding the market cannot do this. They are technology companies, not medical practices.
Only licensed healthcare providers with Carequality and TEFCA access can query the national infrastructure for your complete medical history. Modulus is one of those providers.
We obtain your complete healthcare history. Electronic health records are only part of the picture, and often a small part. Much of your history exists in systems that do not communicate with one another, in disconnected computer systems and paper files stored in medical records departments, in faxed documents that were never digitized, in legacy systems that predate modern networks. Also, if you ever paid cash for care or for testing, that information may also be missing from the electronic network.
Even the national networks have gaps. Not every provider in America is connected. Small practices, rural clinics, older physicians, and specialty facilities may still operate outside the electronic health information exchange infrastructure.
For these providers, Modulus conducts manual retrieval. Retrieving your complete history requires staff making phone calls, sending faxes, following up repeatedly, and sometimes physically tracking down records from storage facilities. We request records the old-fashioned way when necessary. We track down the imaging CD from 2014. We obtain the operative notes from the surgeon who has since retired. We retrieve the paper chart from the practice that closed and transferred its archives to a warehouse.
This is painstaking, time-consuming work that no consumer app provider can afford to do at scale. Modulus does it because a complete medical history is not optional for accurate diagnosis. It is essential.
The practical difference: A consumer health app will analyze what you upload and tell you what it sees.
Modulus will retrieve records you did not know existed, from providers you have forgotten, in formats ranging from modern FHIR APIs to paper faxes, and analyze your complete history going back decades.
One of these approaches is convenient. The other is medicine.