A Baltimore company will soon have its technology installed on every Samsung device, opening up a market of millions of potential users across the world.
B.well Connected Health will partner with the South Korean technology giant to bring its platform, which helps patients compile all their medical records in one place, to the Samsung Health app. B.well and Samsung will also provide health care advice to customers, such as reminders about vaccinations and cancer screenings, once the partnership goes live in 2024. Samsung Health is automatically installed on every single Samsung device and the application recorded 64 million monthly users across the world in 2023.
“We believe that it is life-saving for consumers and their families to have access to their health records," b.well CEO Kristen Valdes said.
The partnership between the two companies will begin in the United States before expanding to Samsung’s international customers, Valdes said. Health care companies like Walgreens and Rise Health will also partner with b.well to offer scheduling for in-person care and telehealth appointments on the application. The result will be a shoppable marketplace for health care where patients can compare different providers based on cost and other factors.
The Federal Hill company earned the opportunity by answering a request for proposal by Samsung, Valdes said. The multinational corporation has tried to incorporate health care into its products for years by providing fitness tracking, food and water tracking, and other information through the Samsung health application.
“The minute that we started talking about [Samsung’s] vision of what they're looking to accomplish, we realized that we are incredibly similar in thinking and could almost finish each other's sentences,” Valdes said.
B.well already had experience managing large numbers of users before the Samsung contract. The company’s contracts with firms like MedStar Health cover 100 million patients, not including the Samsung partnership. The company has also seen success in the venture capital markets, raising $32 million of venture capital funding in 2021.
Valdes founded b.well in 2015 to fix the fragmented nature of health care data that makes it difficult for patients to keep tabs on their medical records. Every doctor and insurance company often has their own individual log-in portal, forcing consumers to juggle dozens of passcodes to find out appointment or medication schedules. B.well provides a single platform that combines all of a patient's medical information in one place to make it easier for patients to understand their vaccination schedule or identify possible drug interactions from different prescriptions.
The company is going to launch a second partnership next year to make further improvements to its application. B.well still needs patients to remember the dozens of passcodes to all of their doctor and insurance websites to gather the initial health care information, Valdes said. B.well is partnering with identity verification firm Clear to give patients the option to sign in to medical portals using biometric data, like eyes or fingerprints, instead of a passcode.
“My daughter who lives with a chronic condition has 27 patient portals,” Valdes said. “That's just on the clinical side. None of them are accurate. None of them talk to each other. She has to remember 27 logins and passwords to even think about beginning to compile a [health care] record. With b.well she can access her record in one place and once we launch with Clear next year, she'll be able to do that without having to remember those 27 portal IDs.”
