Too Big to Fix Alone: Healthcare Friction Isn’t Solved Without Partnerships

HLTH Perspectives | Insights From Jason Higgins, SVP of Corporate and Business Development, and Humza Raees, Director of Strategic Partnerships

When people say healthcare is broken, they mean it is broken for them. Anyone who has tried to book a specialist, gather their own records or make sense of a bill knows the experience. 

The friction consumers experience is the result of a system that was never designed around them. At the most basic level, this shows up as repeated intake forms, records that don’t follow the consumer, and portals that each show only a limited slice of a history. None of this friction was built on purpose. Aside from a few organizations with broad horizontal integration across the healthcare consumer journey, no single organization owns the whole problem. That is exactly why the friction persists. 

This piece looks at where that friction comes from, what it costs consumers and the organizations serving them, and why removing it requires partnerships, technology, and data working together rather than any one company acting alone. To be clear, data interoperability isn’t a magic pill that resolves every friction point, but it is an immediate and actionable place to begin putting the consumer into the conversation.

Why Scale Became an Obstacle in Healthcare

Healthcare is among the largest industries in the United States and it carries the inertia of that scale. Over decades it has accumulated friction at every seam — Not because anyone designed it to be hard, but because the person at the center has only ever been seen in pieces: a patient to one organization, a member to another and, to all of them, the one ultimately responsible for the costs of care. 

Seeing them as a single individual with a single health story simply hasn’t been done yet. Consumers rarely had a voice when solutions were being designed for them. This is odd since the cost lands on the consumer first. As value-based care gains momentum, it increasingly lands on the organizations trying to serve them. We view this economic impact as a long overdue mechanism to bring the current stakeholders back to the design table. Healthcare is a near-perfect example of how friction within a system shows where it is failing.

Clinical trials show this as clearly as anything in healthcare. At b.well, we see clinical trial participation as part of a person’s care journey. It is also one of the most overlooked parts, because there has rarely been an obvious, accessible on-ramp, and whether a patient hears about a trial often depends on whether their providers happen to know about it.

Take a single example: 

• A woman in her fifties with a progressing condition sees a specialist who runs out of standard options. Somewhere, a sponsor is actively enrolling a trial she’d qualify for. 

• But she never hears about it. Her specialist doesn’t know it’s open. The sponsor’s recruiters are working from a short list of academic sites in other states. 

• The lab results, diagnosis codes and medication history that would have matched her in minutes are spread across three health systems and a pharmacy, none of which share a record. Months pass. 

• The trial fills without her, the sponsor spends more to get there, and she never learns there was a door she could have walked through. Nobody in that story did anything wrong. 

• The system simply had no mechanism for connecting the person to the opportunity, and no one whose job it was to build one.

What Does Consumer-Centered Healthcare Actually Look Like?

The missing design factor has been the healthcare consumer. Put the person at the center. Give them a single, complete record and control over who gets to use it. Then let licensed professionals and consumers connect directly inside the apps, platforms and services people already rely on every day, whether that’s their health plan’s app, an AI assistant, a wellness program or a retail pharmacy. When that happens, much of the accumulated friction simply has no reason to exist.

That principle is behind every partnership we signed this year. 

• With myTomorrows, a b.well-powered unified longitudinal record feeds AI-powered eligibility matching, so patients and care teams can make clinical trial participation part of their care journey. Trial sponsors are able to reach larger and more diverse populations while reducing recruitment costs.
• With Wheel, our data and access infrastructure connects to a clinical delivery layer. That closes the gap between a health insight and an actual visit, prescription or follow-up.
• With MyDirectives, advance care planning documents sit alongside the rest of a person’s health information instead of in a file cabinet.

In each case the patient gets a shorter path, and the organization on the other side benefits from faster enrollment, higher conversion to care and fewer hours spent reconstructing a history that should have been there already.

How Does Removing Consumer Friction Deliver Benefit?

We hear a version of the same question from almost every prospective partner: this is good for consumers, but what does it do for us? The answer is that the two were never in tension. The same friction that frustrates a consumer is a cost line for the organization serving them.

WellSense launched a plan-branded web and mobile experience built on our platform that unifies medical, pharmacy and behavioral data for 700,000 members, with proactive outreach, caregiver tools and more than 100 embedded care-gap programs. Members get one place to see and act on their health. The plan gets care-gap closure at scale.

Noom, Welldoc and Humana connected to our network this spring as part of their CMS Health Technology Ecosystem commitments, giving consumers access to their records across providers, plans and pharmacies while the organizations gain real-time data for personalization and claims processing. Consumer friction down, operational return up. Designed around the consumer, delivered through the enterprise.

Why Is b.well Built on Partnerships, Technology and Data?

Because none of this works without all three at scale. 

Partnerships

No single organization holds someone’s full health history. Our data network reaches 2.4 million providers and 350+ health plans through Patient Access APIs, along with labs, pharmacies and hundreds of personal health devices, and connects through TEFCA, CommonWell, state HIEs and the CMS-Aligned Network with the right legal authority behind every query. This data can enable a wide range of use cases for consumers across healthcare.

Technology

Raw records are not usable records. Verified identity, persistent consent, record location, provenance and our 13-Step Data Refinery are what turn fragmented inputs into a single, clean, AI-ready longitudinal record. That’s infrastructure, not a feature, and it has to be maintained continuously. This utility infrastructure can be used downstream by organizations to more effectively serve the consumer. 

Data

The record is the product. Clinical data, not just claims. Structured and unstructured clinical notes. Delivered through our SDK for Health AI so organizations can build on it in weeks rather than months.

What Are the Four Ways to Build on b.well?

Over the past year we’ve formalized how organizations work with us. Every model starts from the same commitment: you keep your brand, your user relationship, your SDK and your roadmap. We handle the record.

1. Direct. You serve a population of members, patients or customers and want to give them a b.well-powered experience under your own name. Health plans and health systems typically start here.
2. OEM. b.well runs underneath your product. Your users see a smarter version of you; we provide the connected record, consent and identity layer that makes it possible. This is how AI platforms, consumer health apps and large technology companies build with us and compete for active users.
3. Reseller and marketplace. You already sell into healthcare and want to add record connectivity, consumer access or CMS-Aligned Network participation to your offering. We package it, you carry it and drive stickiness with your ecosystem and tools.
4. Sell-with. Advisors, consultancies and integrators bring b.well into client work whenever the strategy calls for a connected record. You bring the relationship; we bring the network and the standards expertise.

Life sciences, diagnostics, pharmacy, health tech and payers each fit a slightly different combination of these models. If you’re trying to take friction out of a consumer journey and want to understand what building on b.well would look like for your organization, come talk to us at HLTH 2026 (Booth #4751) or connect with us here.