⚡ Around the Wards
Metriport raised $26M for open-source clinical data retrieval — led by TJ Parker at Matrix, with ARTIS and Y Combinator participating. Amazon One Medical, Sollis Health and Color Health already run on it. Full read below.
Datavant launched a provider-to-provider exchange network the same day — days to hours, and it finally kills the fax request.
Boston Scientific disclosed a cyberattack disrupting order processing and shipping worldwide — no restoration timeline. Your device supply chain is a dependency graph nobody drew.
🎧 Podcast: Healthcare is Hard — “Healthcare’s Biggest AI Opportunity Isn’t Clinical. It’s Consumer.” — CVS built ~150,000 individual-level agentic twins and tests product concepts against them before launch.
🔮 My bet: retrieval consolidates to two or three winners inside eighteen months, and the deciding variable isn’t API quality. It’s which one the network governance bodies are comfortable letting other people’s customers ride on.
🔬 The Big Thing
The code is open. The door still has a bouncer.
Metriport raised $26 million on Thursday to expand what it calls open-source healthcare data infrastructure — the matching, extraction, standardization and deduplication that turns scattered records into one queryable model. Amazon One Medical, Sollis Health and Color Health already run on it.
That same morning, Datavant launched a provider-to-provider exchange network built to cut retrieval from days to hours. Two bets on the same bottleneck in one news cycle. Neither is about a model.
The interesting sentence in the Metriport release isn’t the funding. It’s from their general counsel, Matt Davis-Ratner: “We do deep diligence on every organization that wants to access the healthcare exchange data networks via Metriport ... we pay attention to who’s actually in the room during onboarding calls.”
Their COO, Colin Elsinga, says they open-sourced the code because “the decisions around how patient information is managed and transformed are too important to trust to a black box.”
Both are true, and together they tell you where the black box moved.
The transformation logic is now inspectable. You can read how a duplicate allergy gets collapsed, how a mangled C-CDA becomes a resource, which fields get dropped. That layer has been opaque for twenty years and it’s where records quietly get corrupted before anyone sees them.
The access decision is not inspectable. It’s a vetting call, a HITRUST r2 certificate, and a person deciding who you are.
That isn’t hypocrisy. It’s probably correct. But notice which half you control. You can fork the repo tonight. You cannot fork the onboarding call.
😤 “Open source in health data is a marketing word.” Sometimes. Not obviously here — publishing the transformation layer is a real accountability move. Judge it by whether anyone outside the company has ever filed a bug against the deduplication logic.
😤 “So the moat is paperwork.” Yes. It’s been paperwork the whole time. We just told ourselves it was engineering.
❓ If retrieval commoditizes down to an install and a vetting call, what’s the first clinical product that only becomes possible once every patient arrives with a complete record?
📡 Builder’s Radar
Behavioral health data just got a $17M bet, and the cap table is the tell.
Onos Health closed a $17M Series A led by Costanoa, with Flare Capital and CVS Health Ventures, to structure unstructured behavioral health data for health plans.
Behavioral health is the hardest documentation in medicine to structure. The diagnosis lives in narrative, the severity lives in tone, and the outcome measure is a nine-question form nobody fills out consistently.
💡 80/20: If you build anything that reads clinical narrative, behavioral health is your hardest test set and your best one. Twenty synthetic psych notes, extract PHQ-9 severity and suicidality risk, grade by hand. Those failure modes show up everywhere else first.
⚡ Quick hits
The invisible labor of running agents at scale — the work doesn’t disappear, it becomes allocation, specification, evaluation and recovery, none of which any dashboard measures. Log the minutes you spend supervising agents separately from doing the work for a week. Over a third and you don’t have a tool, you have a direct report.
Stanford’s SPHERE portal — a fully synthetic twin of the Stanford ADRC cohort: 644 participants, nine modalities, cognition through amyloid PET and CSF proteomics, no IRB amendment. Released back in April, so not news — but it’s the best free multi-omics sandbox going. Non-commercial DUA.
AWS is acquiring DuckLabs, DuckDB staying independent and open source. Matters because DuckDB is quietly the default engine for claims and registry extracts on a laptop.
🎙️ From the Pods
Sri Narasimhan, who runs enterprise customer experience, insights and innovation at CVS Health, describes building roughly 150,000 individual-level “agentic twins” — each seeded from a moderated, consented interview of about an hour, plus behavioral and demographic data — and testing messages, formulary changes and product concepts against them before launch. They kept them at N=1 rather than rolling up to personas, so any subpopulation stays queryable later.
“I have 150,000 patients in the room with us.” — Sri Narasimhan, CVS Health
💡 Builder take: His reason for building twins should land hardest for you — clinicians won’t answer your research requests. If you can’t recruit forty physicians to evaluate your workflow, build twins from the handful who’ll give you an hour.
🔇 Speaker Blindspot: Begging the question. The twins are pitched as the fix for say-do bias. But the training substrate is an hour of someone answering questions about their preferences — stated preference, the exact thing that produces say-do bias. And “somewhere between 85 and 90%” accurate arrives with no holdout design.
🎙️ Rounds (Second Opinion) — “The EHR is Dead, Long Live the EHR”
Sam Toole of Primary Venture Partners relays what Epic insiders are telling people: a three-to-four-year backlog is now buildable in about a year. His useful conclusion — stop trying to displace the system of record, build the system of action, and monetize the way EHRs actually do, which is revenue cycle, not seats.
He also reports PointClickCare moved to block computer-use agents on its platform. Treat that as a claim, not a filing — but if your product depends on agentic browsing of someone else’s platform, you have a countdown clock, not a moat.
🔇 Speaker Blindspot: Appeal to unverifiable anecdote. The evidence for “software is nearly free to build now” is secondhand, and one claim arrives with an explicit disclaimer that the speaker isn’t sure it’s true — after which the panel reasons from it as fact.
💡 BTW
💡 BTW: TJ Parker, who led Metriport’s round, grew up around his father Lenny’s pharmacy in Concord, New Hampshire — Northeast Pharmacy Services, twenty-five people filling prescriptions for a hundred assisted living facilities and group homes around the state. The individual-dose packaging that business used for eldercare is the thing TJ took and turned into PillPack. Amazon bought it for about $1 billion. Boston Globe
💺 Builder Seats
Chief Clinical Informatics Officer — City of Hope · Duarte, CA · $145–210/hr
Posted requirement is MD/DO plus formal informatics training — a seat written for a practicing informatician, not a data executive.
🔗 Apply on LinkedIn
Know someone hiring for a clinical AI or informatics leadership role? Reply and I’ll include it.
You have a unique combination of skills, experience and values. So do great things! … and tell me about them at kevin@clinicians.build.
— Kevin & AI
(please verify content for yourself, may contain errors)
Colin and Dima from Metriport are great guys, I've talked to them a few times over the years, and plan to implement Metriport in my app shortly. Glad to see that they are doing so well.