UPDATED 5 P.M
President Donald Trump spoke about the new health data sharing initiatives at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, seated next to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, CMS Advisor and DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason and AI and Crypto Czar David Sachs.
“The key breakthrough we've made is getting many of the biggest names in healthcare and technology to agree to that real those standards of electronic medical records that we talk about and you've heard about for so many years, and now it's happening," Trump said. "This will allow patients to easily transmit information from one doctor to another, even if they're different networks and using different record keeping systems, no matter what system they use, they're all transferable. The new standards will also make it simple for patients to access their own personal health records."
He continued: "Thanks to this announcement, health care providers across the country will also finally be able to kill the clipboard. …instead of filling out the same tedious paperwork at every medical appointment, patients will simply be able to grant their doctors access to their records at the push of a button, just a button, and you're all set, and all the information the doctor needs will be immediately transmitted.
“The system will be entirely opt in, and there will be no centralized government run database, which everyone is always concerned about. I'm less concerned than anybody. … people are very, very concerned about the personal records. They want to keep them very quiet, and that's their choice. I think it's a great thing, because it will be, it'll be absolutely quiet. Instead, doctors and patients will always remain in control. The benefits to millions of Americans will be enormous."
UPDATED 2:45 P.M.
The White House and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced they secured voluntary commitments from 60 healthcare technology organizations, including Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, and OpenAI, to work collaboratively on a new health tech advancement initiative. The 60 companies will deliver results in the first quarter of 2026, though what those deliverables look like remains to be seen.
The “Make Health Tech Great Again” meeting was hosted by President Donald Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz. At the meeting, CMS revealed voluntary criteria for data exchange that will be accessible by health information networks and exchanges, electronic health records and tech platforms.
The administration has two focus areas: a CMS interoperability framework and increasing the availability of personalized tools. The administration has a clear focus on consumers and support for individual access to electronic health records.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
CMS Interoperability Framework
In addition to the pledges signed by the private sector, CMS unveiled a new voluntary CMS Interoperability Framework to share data and “stop theoretical debates and start delivering real results.”
CMS is searching for early adopters to make a similar pledge as did digital health companies, to meet and showcase advancements towards CMS’ interoperability goals by Q1 2026.
The interoperability framework includes some basic criteria, like patient access and empowerment, provider access, timely data availability, transparency and security.
Patients should be able to use an app of their choice to access structured and unstructured electronic medical information with a digital identity credential, CMS’ framework says. Patients should be able to access their claims, explanation of benefits and prior authorizations from current or past payers. Patients should also have access to an audit log of who has accessed their data, when and why.
By July 4th, 2026, networks must provide access to data through FHIR APIs, including FHIR Bulk data exchange; return chart notes and clinical documents as FHIR attachments; and, give appointment and encounter notifications for outpatient, telehealth, emergency department and inpatient encounters using FHIR subscriptions.
Participants must agree to be displayed as a CMS Aligned Network, update the national provider directory, provide metrics on network queries and support queries across federated networks for patient records.
CMS Aligned Networks are likely to include participation by Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs), health information exchanges, health plans and providers, a source with knowledge of the announcement said. CMS announced it will fully participate in the Trusted Exchange and Common Framework Agreement “in a meaningful way” in early June.
A press release by CMS says that 21 networks pledge to meet its new interoperability framework and become CMS Aligned Networks.
The new CMS Aligned Networks are “a major step forward” CMS said. The agency will share Blue Button claims data through the Aligned Networks as early as Q1 2026, a press release said. Patients will be able to use modern digital identity systems to prevent the need to remember user names and passwords.
The CMS also announced updates on health tech initiatives revealed on June 3. CMS will create an enhanced plan finder, a national provider directory with FHIR-based APIs to be released later this year, adding modern digital identity to Medicare.gov. It will also develop faster Blue Button Data and FHIR-based digital insurance cards.
CMS will integrate digital identity and the National Provider Directory into the expanded Data at the Point of Care program.
Businesses and health tech advocates expressed enthusiasm about the White House’s pending announcement on Tuesday at an event hosted by the Consumer Technology Association and the Health Innovation Alliance. Though the details of the announcement had not yet been released, the speakers discussed their general support for the administration's focus on health technology.
Kevin Harper, head of government affairs at Teladoc Health, said the administration needs the whole industry to engage with it to carry out its health tech priorities. Players like Teladoc have long pushed to move health tech regulations forward, like telehealth access for Medicare beneficiaries.
The private sector has also innovated to meet consumer demand for expanded healthcare access through mobile devices and asynchronous modalities.
“We haven’t talked about the consumer side of things, or the patient side of things,” Rich Brennan, vice president of federal affairs at the ALS Association, said. “[We] just sort of left it on the side of the table while we worked on all these other programs that were really focused on providers and the hospitals and the places where you receive care.”
He continued: “Having remote physiological monitoring, having wearable monitors, being able to re-package how healthcare is delivered is really important, especially for people that are stuck in their homes when you have a neurological disease such as ALS.”
Brennan described how the Medicare program was not originally designed to suit consumer preferences. Shifting to consumer-focused care could help re-engineer how patients engage with the system.
“I really think what we're talking about here is bringing customer obsession-focused, on-demand care … simple to navigate,” Claire Wulf Winiarek, head of healthcare policy at Amazon, said. “We're using technology to really simplify and remove that friction and to just make it a much better experience that people want to go back to. So when you're thinking about, how do we prevent chronic disease? How do we better manage? It's about that preventative care, getting people to engage regularly.”
Winiarek described Amazon’s use of an AI scribe during its provider visits, which allows the providers to engage better with patients. She also discussed a price transparency tool Amazon developed with Prime Therapeutics.
“The way Dr. Oz talks about this is very different, like we nerd out … on HL7 standards or whatever it is,” Joel White, president of HIA said on the Tuesday panel. “No one has any idea what we're talking about. He talks about patients. He talks about care delivery. He talks about burden reduction. He talks about lower cost.”
HHS also announced on Wednesday the creation of a Living HHS Open Data Plan and a refreshed Healthdata.gov.
This is a developing story and will be updated.