With a clear vision of free and secure health data access, MatchRite Care puts the patient back at the center of healthcare and in charge of their own records.
In episode 17 of the Digital Health Hackers Podcast, Dr. Sidharth Ramesh speaks to Christopher Jones, the founder of MatchRite Care.
Founded in 2018, MatchRite Care is a unified health record portal for patients and providers that places the patient at the center. The company evolved from Chris’s experience with the medical bureaucracy and personal loss, and they have remained steadfast in their values, “to make [healthcare data] legible for the patient because they are the center of care.”
How one family’s struggle led to a patient-first platform#
When Chris Jones came to the healthcare space, he was as a seasoned IT architect with about two decades of enterprise systems experience. His first stint was with a home health company that supported hospice, home health and pediatric care. It required interacting with 4 different EMRs and gave him a preview into the particular challenges posed by healthcare data.
In 2009, Chris’s 5 year old son, CJ was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain tumor. The family fought to get him into a promising clinical trial, but they missed the enrollment window while waiting for a copy of CJ’s imaging results to come through. CJ passed away eleven months later. 16 years later in 2025, not much has changed in the patient data landscape. We may have gone from physical results in DVDs to shareable electronic health records, but the technical and bureaucratic barriers for patients to gain access to their health information still persists.
By the time Chris founded MatchRite Care in 2018, he’d been on both sides of the challenge, as a provider and a patient caregiver. Timely access to the complete patient record is essential to delivering and receiving quality care. This became his mission.
Inside MatchRite’s patient-centric engine#
MatchRite’s simple mission is a radical change from the traditional healthcare ecosystem - empower the patient with a legible and shareable form of their complete health record. In practice, MatchRite has created a unique common data set they use to aggregate data across 16 EMRs including Veteran Affairs, and over 40,000 hospitals. Importantly, these connections are built outside of conventional bureaucratic channels, eliminating dependencies on HIEs that usually take time and effort.
The platform provides a standardized view for clinical data including vitals, labs, medications, procedures, conditions and doctor notes. The consistent format allows for greater understanding and easier use of this data. It also supports adding information about caregivers and dependents, and lets the user manage multiple profiles with a single account. Additionally patients or caregivers can add notes to each clinical category, incorporating a greater level of detail.
“We also take it a step further and allow patients to be able to share their data with providers." Matchrite's provider platform lets hospitals access any data patients have shared with them. Here too the platform centers the patient, including safeguarding their consent and privacy by design.
While most interoperability tools serve institutions, MatchRite has focused on the patient from the start. Their goal remains to give patients timely, readable and actionable access to their health history.
Real world impact#
There have been some interesting cases where MatchRite’s quick and easy access to a comprehensive patient record has had an impact, including connecting rural and urban health centers, serving patients with acute or rare issues and supporting veteran health.
For a patient who wants to connect their history from a rural medical provider to a larger hospital or chain in a city, the process of transferring medical records is not very simple. The IT systems would be different, and bureaucratic systems live and expand in these spaces. MatchRite is often used to bridge this distance. Similarly, for patients dealing with acute or rare illnesses, having access to their comprehensive medical record via MatchRite lets them coordinate across multiple specialists and ensure they all have the right information. This empowers the patient and their healthcare providers to make informed, data-driven decisions regarding care.
In the case of veterans, MatchRite Care is certified by the US Department of Veteran Affairs(VA) to provide veterans universal access to their digital medical records. It also supports care coordination for veterans across VA Medical Centers, VA CRC for community care and private sector providers. Here and in other cases, the objective of MatchRite Care is to provide a source of truth for unified patient information. Once this information is available with the patient, it can be updated, annotated and shared as decided by them.
A vision for the future#
MatchRite has recently started opening up APIs to allow third-party access to their unified patient record. This along with a single sign on (SSO) allows the patient to share their data with any third party app, where it can be ingested and used. The focus here remains on patient consent and privacy, and ensures the safeguarding of patient data while allowing access that enables quality care.
“I really see this as a floor,” says Chris, asserting that building the connected patient-centered data set is just the beginning. When discussing cutting edge technologies like AI, Chris goes to the foundations - “In order for AI to be successful, the data has to be meaningful”, and it’s true. Additionally they are exploring AI summarization to assist better, faster decision making.
Chris also sees potential for MatchRite to play a role in clinical trial matching, connecting patients with trials based on their comprehensive health histories. There could be further applications in healthcare research, leveraging this data for the development of new treatments and care delivery mechanisms. Bypassing the barriers that slow down data sharing is how MatchRite has set the stage for a future where efficient patient-provider-researcher collaboration can take place.
Conclusion#
Born from a deeply personal experience, MatchRite Care has remained focused on its mission to revolutionize healthcare data access for patients. Christopher Jones built on his decades of technology experience to tackle healthcare’s data interoperability problem, but this time with the patient at the center. The MatchRite Care platform creates comprehensive, longitudinal patient records that can collect information from 16+ leading EMRs covering 40,000+ hospitals. With this, patients and caregivers can access, manage and share medical records in real-time, irrespective of where the data originated. Importantly, it allows the bypass of complex, time-consuming bureaucratic healthcare processes.
Prioritizing patient empowerment, privacy and consent, MatchRite provides a foundation for the patient-centered health ecosystem of the future. With the recent release of open APIs, third party developers and researchers can now tap into this unified patient record, fostering innovation and delivering quality care. MatchRite’s common dataset for the patient record is just the beginning, with the potential to contribute to research and AI-based applications promising exciting developments in the future. Chris connects the innovation MatchRite has achieved with his original mission, “My ‘why’ was strong, and I am grateful for where we are now”.
Beyond the clinical and technical contributions, the story of MatchRite is a story of resilience, of finding hope in adversity, and of working steadfastly towards your ‘why’. To listen to the full conversation with Christopher, head on over to our Youtube channel.