Today, we're excited to share Flexpal publicly for the first time - a smart health agent that helps you both download your own healthcare records from anywhere and use them directly in conversations with AI.
Patient access APIs and Flexpa's existing consented-records retrieval platform already help patients download their records—Flexpal makes them even easier to get and ready to use.
Ask about the cost of your last procedure, what your lab results mean, or which medications you were on last year. Unlike other AI chatbots and agents, Flexpal answers using your actual health records, stored locally on your device.
Early access users are receiving TestFlight invites today. Join the waitlist to get notified the moment it hits the app store.
Why We Built Flexpal
Real health records are notoriously difficult to understand. Healthcare itself is one of the original industries for federal regulation of APIs (HIPAA X12 transactions).
Even when patients can access their records through payer portals or patient access APIs, the raw FHIR resources and CDAs are filled with medical codes, unfamiliar terminology, and disconnected data points.
Patients are left wondering: What does this actually mean for me? What should I do about it?
The promise of patient access APIs like CMS-9115, ONC (g)(10), and TEFCA IAS is to give patients control over their health data.
But no silver bullet for access exists (the long tail of patient access goes for miles) and access alone isn't enough (why hasn't a personal health record app ever scaled?).
And yet, doctors and healthcare practitioners have benefited from rapid advancements in agentic workflows such as Stanford Medicine's CharEHR and the seemingly limitless number of scribe entrants. But patients generally have been left to copy and paste PDF exports into ChatGPT, at best.
Flexpal changes that and brings a smart health agent experience directly to patients.
How Flexpal Works
To start, we multiplex existing patient access APIs. That's a fun sounding word, what do we mean? The agent first helps you establish a connection to your records no matter what network they happen to be available on.
This is particularly effective due to investments Flexpa has made in publishing patient access API endpoint directories. The agent can dynamically call tools to help you research where records might be located and then match those to Flexpa's internal endpoint database. We will share more about how this particular step works later this week.
Once Flexpal has helped you download your own healthcare records, you can start asking questions about them.
The power here isn't just that users can ask questions. It's that the agent makes intelligent tool calls behind the scenes to actually navigate and analyze those records in dynamic ways. Some have called this a sort of "conversational interoperability", which aligns with what Flexpa ourselves anticipated in June 2024.
When you ask Flexpal about your health conditions, it doesn't just search through text. It performs structured queries against your real records represented as FHIR resources. The agent can retrieve diagnosis codes, lab results, medication histories, and clinical notes to build a comprehensive picture of your health. It can identify patterns across time, connect related conditions, and surface insights that would be difficult to spot by manually reviewing records.
Flexpal can also reach beyond your stored records when needed. If you ask about lifestyle changes or treatment options, it can perform intelligent web searches to find current medical guidance and research, then synthesize that information with your specific health profile to provide personalized recommendations. It always cites its sources so you can verify and learn more.
The conversational interface means you can ask follow-up questions, clarify points of confusion, or drill down into specific aspects of your health. Flexpal maintains context throughout the conversation, allowing for natural back-and-forth dialogue that feels less like querying a database and more like talking to a knowledgeable assistant who has read through all your medical records.
You can ask Flexpal to help with practical tasks too. Need to find all visits related to a specific condition? Want to understand which medications you were on during a particular time period? Looking to create a summary to share with a new provider? Flexpal can handle these requests by intelligently querying and organizing your data.
Part of a Larger Vision
Flexpal is both a real agent for patients and a demonstration of what's possible with the Flexpa platform.
As an agent, Flexpal is one feature of our broader mobile app that gives users complete control over their health information. The app allows users to:
- Obtain their health records for free via Flexpa's network of patient access APIs and connections to health insurers, EHRs, and TEFCA IAS
- View and manage their health information in one place
- Share records securely via SMART Health Links as part of our pledge to Kill the Clipboard
All records are stored locally on the user's device, ensuring privacy and giving users true ownership of their health data.
As a developer platform, Flexpa enables developers to build their own agentic experiences with consented health records.
The same infrastructure powering Flexpal—our network of patient access APIs, FHIR resources, and consented records exchange—is available to developers building healthcare applications. Whether you're building for providers, payers, benefits navigation, clinical research, or legal use cases, Flexpa provides the foundation for secure, consented access to real health data.
Looking Ahead
We're particularly excited about where this is heading as we expand our data access capabilities. We have much more to say on this point later in the week.
Our goal is to transform how people interact with their health data and we believe tools like Flexpal help make interoperable health data truly useful for everyone.
The mobile app is currently in TestFlight. If you'd like an invite to be part of our early group of testers, let us know.
Interested in building healthcare applications powered by Flexpa? Check out our developer documentation or contact us to learn how we can help you power your healthcare data-driven applications.
