The Consent Conundrum: How Carol Robinson Is Giving Patients Control of Their Health Data

No Operating Manual | Episode featuring Carol Robinson, Founder & CEO of Midato Health

What happens when a healthcare policy veteran interviews thousands of stakeholders and keeps hearing the same problem? She builds a company to solve it.

Carol Robinson spent years in Oregon state government shaping health IT infrastructure before launching Cedar Bridge Group, a consulting firm that brought her face-to-face with one of healthcare's most persistent — and overlooked — problems: patient consent. Specifically, the near-impossible challenge of getting sensitive behavioral health and mental health data to flow safely between providers who need it most.

In this episode, Carol shares the origin story of Midato Health and its flagship product, ShareApprove, a consent management platform designed to put patients back in the driver's seat of their own health data. We dig into what it actually takes to build a compliant, scalable software product in healthcare, why data privacy is getting more complicated (not less), and why Carol believes patients deserve to be more than "the football" in the healthcare team sport.

In this episode:

• How Carol went from state government to startup founder
• The real barriers blocking integrated behavioral and primary care
• How ShareApprove works, and why scalability was everything
• Navigating data privacy in a landscape of rising bad actors
• The financial reality of building healthcare-grade software from scratch