Thrive Mobile and HealthEx partner to make health record access native to every member’s phone
Collaboration embeds medical record access directly into Thrive’s mobile onboarding — advancing CMS’s vision for patient interoperability and the industry’s “Kill the Clipboard” movement for populations who need it most.
Thrive Mobile, the first wireless provider built to drive healthcare outcomes for underserved Americans, today announced a partnership with HealthEx, the health platform that lets individuals unify their medical records and securely share them with any trusted app, AI platform, provider, or health plan. Together, the companies will make it effortless for patients to retrieve, consent to, and carry their complete medical records wherever care happens.
Interoperability is finally within reach, but for the communities Thrive serves, the barriers are rarely technical. Being underserved can be a function of income, zip code, or other social drivers, and contributes to obstacles such as awareness, digital literacy, and friction in obtaining care. A member may not know they have a right to their records, recall their places of care, remember various patient-portal passwords, or be able to navigate the various apps required to assemble their unified health history. The result is the same outdated ritual that has defined American healthcare for decades: a clipboard, a stack of forms, and a request to recall a medical history scattered across providers a member can’t always name. That burden has fallen on everyday Americans for too long, and Thrive and HealthEx are proud to be paving a new path for any member looking to better manage their health.
The Thrive–HealthEx partnership removes that burden by building record access directly into their smartphone. Thrive provides a phone to each member and manages it directly through its mobile device management (MDM) capabilities. HealthEx record access is surfaced to every member inside the Thrive experience, with no separate app to find or download. Behind that experience, HealthEx locates and returns records across the national interoperability network and keeps them current, so members can assemble a longitudinal health record with ease. During onboarding, members share their record with Thrive through a simple, secure process, and can save a medical-record QR code so their records are ready for their provider at the point of care. No account to create and no clipboard to fill out.
Together, the companies are advancing two goals at the center of CMS’s interoperability agenda: giving patients real ownership of their health data, and “killing the clipboard” by replacing manual intake with connected, patient-mediated records. For health plans, the same connected record supports better care-gap closure, more accurate risk adjustment, and lower-cost administrative workflows, turning a patient-friendly experience into measurable value across the system.
Member consent and control are built into the experience from the start. Connecting a health record is always the member’s choice: members decide whether to connect their records to the Thrive platform, see what information is shared and with whom, and can stop sharing their records at any time. HealthEx retrieves and shares records only with the member’s permission, handled through its secure, standards-based consent framework, so expanding access never comes at the expense of privacy or trust.
“Interoperability has been a promise to most Americans and a reality for almost none of them — and the gap is widest exactly where we work. Our job is to make data access effortless. We want every American to carry a medical-record QR code in their wallet that transacts their records where and how they need them, and with the device in a member’s hand. With partners like HealthEx behind the experience, we can finally make that real for the people the system usually leaves last.”
“The patients who can least afford to are often the ones asked to bear the greatest burdens of care navigation. Income, zip code, and digital access already stack the odds against patients on Medicaid, and the system leaves these patients to track down health records across scattered providers. Thrive and HealthEx unify their disconnected records and put them right on the device already in their hand.”
The partnership begins with a pilot that puts the experience in the hands of an initial group of early testers within a first health-plan population, with broader availability targeted for early 2027.
About Thrive Mobile
Thrive Mobile is the first wireless provider built to drive better health outcomes for underserved, rural, Medicaid, and Medicare populations. Members receive a free smartphone, unlimited talk, text, and data at no cost, and a U.S.-based support team. An engagement layer brings together claims, pharmacy, and other data into a member 360 view, surfacing the right next-best action at the right moment. Thrive partners with health plans and with states through the Rural Health Transformation Fund to enable one-click access to care.
About HealthEx
HealthEx empowers individuals to seamlessly and securely access and share their health records at the moments that matter, with all actions grounded in digital identity and explicit consent. Linking digital identity, real-time health records access, and consent, HealthEx is delivering a future where health data moves seamlessly and responsibly, enabling a new era of consumer-driven healthcare. Learn more at HealthEx.io.
