The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

Building the Largest Health Data Ecosystem in the US | Datavant CEO Kyle Armbrester

Jan 26, 2026

Conversations about modernizing how clinical data moves and why healthcare still relies on fax and after‑the‑fact billing. Exploration of securing patient information against cyberattacks and tokenization as a path to safer data exchange. Discussion of scaling a national health data exchange and the incentives blocking value‑based care and better medical records.

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ANECDOTE

Entry Into Healthcare Through Personal Crisis

Kyle joined healthcare after helping a gubernatorial campaign and meeting Jonathan Bush at Athena Health.
Personal family care experiences (managing his grandmother's hospice) showed him healthcare's chaotic data gaps.

INSIGHT

Billing-First Records Create Upstream Chaos

Healthcare built billing-first records which created massive administrative friction and brittle workflows.
Datavant aims to move data upstream so clinical capture solves billing and reduces downstream waste.

INSIGHT

Digital Replacement For HIM Departments

Datavant functions as a digital HIM department, exchanging clinical data securely across the ecosystem.
They tokenized and linked data to enable new use cases like trials, quality, and risk adjustment.

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It has been said that we don’t have “big data” in healthcare, but instead a large amount of “small data.”

In this episode, Halle speaks with Kyle Armbrester, CEO of Datavant and former CEO of Signify Health (acquired for $8B), about why healthcare data still moves the way it did decades ago and what it will take to modernize it at scale. Kyle reflects on building and leading large health tech companies and explains how fixing data flow could reduce administrative waste, improve security, and make care easier for patients and providers alike.

We cover:

Why healthcare billing still happens after the fact and how that fuels administrative waste
How missing data standards led to fax-based workflows and brittle systems
Why healthcare data is such an attractive target for cyberattacks
How clinical data can be shared digitally without being owned or resold
Leadership lessons from scaling companies through IPOs and acquisitions

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About our guest:

Kyle Armbrester is Chief Executive Officer of Datavant, a healthcare data platform company with a mission to make the world’s health data secure, accessible, and actionable. Datavant operates the largest and most diverse health data exchange in the U.S., connecting more than 70 percent of the 100 largest health systems, all U.S. payers, and 300 plus real world data partners.

Previously, Kyle served as CEO of Signify Health, where he led more than 200 percent revenue growth, took the company public in 2021, and guided its acquisition by CVS Health in 2023 for approximately $8 billion. He later served on the CVS Health executive management team, overseeing healthcare delivery strategy and interoperability.

Earlier in his career, Kyle was Chief Product Officer and Head of Corporate Development at athenahealth, where he helped scale revenue from $320 million to $1.2 billion and launched the company’s partnership marketplace. Kyle has served on multiple healthcare boards and holds an MBA and AB from Harvard University.

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Chapters:

00:01:20 Introduction to Kyle Armbrester and his journey in healthcare

00:03:58 The impact of Athena Health on healthcare innovation

00:06:20 Datavant: Revolutionizing health data interoperability

00:08:15 The role of Datavant in reducing administrative burden

00:12:20 Understanding Datavant's value proposition across stakeholders

00:14:00 Consumer products and data accessibility at Datavant

00:18:25 The scale and impact of Datavant in healthcare

00:19:35 Cybersecurity challenges in healthcare data management

00:23:57 Bridging the gap in healthcare regulations

00:26:13 Unlocking the value of untapped healthcare data