President Trump announced the launching of the “Digital Health Tech Ecosystem” to “bring healthcare into the digital age.”

“During a White House ‘Make Health Tech Great Again’ event hosted with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Administration secured commitments from major healthcare and information technology firms – including Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, and OpenAI – to begin laying the foundation for a next-generation digital health ecosystem that will improve patient outcomes, reduce provider burden, and drive value,” CMS said in a release.

“The key breakthrough we’ve made is getting many of the biggest names in healthcare technology to agree to industry-wide standards for electronic medical records,” Trump said.

“This will allow patients to easily transmit information from one doctor to another,” he continued.

“The system will be entirely opt-in, and there will be no centralized government-run database,” he added.

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“For decades, bureaucrats and entrenched interests buried health data and blocked patients from taking control of their health,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“That ends today. We’re tearing down digital walls, returning power to patients, and rebuilding a health system that serves the people. This is how we begin to Make America Healthy Again,” he added.

“We have the tools and information available now to empower patients to improve their outcomes and their healthcare experience,” said CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“For too long, patients in this country have been burdened with a healthcare system that has not kept pace with the disruptive innovations that have transformed nearly every other sector of our economy. With the commitments made by these entrepreneurial companies today, we stand ready for a paradigm shift in the U.S. healthcare system for the benefit of patients and providers,” he added.

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The Administration’s efforts focus on two broad areas: promoting a CMS Interoperability Framework to easily and seamlessly share information between patients and providers, and increasing the availability of personalized tools so that patients have the information and resources they need to make better health decisions.

“The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) supports actions that improve the timeliness in providing individuals with access to their electronic protected health information, without sacrificing health information privacy and security,” said OCR Director Paula M. Stannard. “If an individual receives another individual’s electronic protected health information in error, generally, OCR’s primary HIPAA enforcement interests are ensuring that the affected individual and HHS receive timely HIPAA breach notification.”

At the White House event, CMS unveiled voluntary criteria for trusted, patient-centered and practical data exchange that will be accessible for all network types—health information networks and exchanges, Electronic Health Records (EHR), and tech platforms.

More than 60 companies pledged to work collaboratively to deliver results for the American people in the first quarter of 2026. Twenty-one networks pledged to meet the CMS Interoperability Framework criteria to become CMS Aligned Networks. Eleven health systems or providers committed to participate and support patient use, and seven EHRs committed to facilitate data exchange and help “kill the clipboard.”

In addition, 30 companies pledged to promote real health outcomes with technology over the coming months. The new tools will use secure digital identity credentials to obtain medical records from CMS Aligned Networks that meet the CMS data sharing criteria.

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Here’s a video of how the “Digital Health Tech Ecosystem” will operate:

Fierce Healthcare shared further details:

Prominent payers and provider organizations signed the pledge, including Cleveland Clinic, CVS Health, Intermountain, Providence, Aetna, Elevance Health, Humana and UnitedHealth Group.

Health tech companies, which form the Health Tech Ecosystem Initiative, include Anthropic, Hippocratic AI, Microsoft AI, Zocdoc, Oura, Oracle, b.well Connected Health and Samsung. In the diabetes and obesity category are Noom, Virta Health and Welldoc, among others.

Joining the Health Tech Ecosystem is a voluntary commitment to a “standards-based digital health environment” that will integrate apps, electronic health records and providers with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Aligned Networks. It puts a focus on making digital health tools user-friendly and valuable to patients and providers.

A total of 30 companies will assist with apps to manage diabetes and obesity, use conversational AI agents and replace paper intake forms with digital check-in. Eleven provider organizations will participate and support patient use. Seven EHRs pledged to share data and “help ‘kill the clipboard.’”

Virta Health will participate within the ecosystem’s diabetes and obesity prevention and management pillar – one of three pillars – to reduce the burden of chronic metabolic conditions on Medicare beneficiaries. It will engage in the Health Tech Ecosystem working group and “explore the use of real clinical data from CMS Aligned Networks,” the company said.

The two other pillars will explore the use of conversational AI assistants for symptom-checking, care navigation and appointment scheduling and digital check-in methods.

 

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