On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched a new initiative in tandem with the White House and HHS aimed at creating a more patient-centric healthcare ecosystem.
As part of the effort, CMS rolled out an interoperability framework to facilitate seamless data exchange across healthcare providers, EHR systems and tech platforms. Already, 21 healthcare data networks have pledged to meet the framework’s criteria and become CMS-aligned networks.
These participating entities vow to enable patients and providers to access both structured and unstructured health data using secure digital identities.
“We have the tools and information available now to empower patients to improve their outcomes and their healthcare experience,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said in a statement. “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.”
Eleven health systems, including Cleveland Clinic and Providence, also signed on to the White House’s pledge, promising to make patient health data more accessible, support secure identity verification and enable third-party apps to retrieve clinical information in standardized formats.
There were also seven EHR vendors who committed to help facilitate better data exchange and better data access for patients.
Additionally, 30 companies pledge to build consumer-facing healthcare apps.
Eighteen of these companies, including OpenAI, Hippocratic AI, Zocdoc and Anthropic, vowed to develop conversational AI assistants — and 12 companies, including Apple and b.well Connected Health, promised to “kill the clipboard” by replacing paper check-in with digital methods and eliminating the need for patients to recall and write out their medical histories.
Lastly, eight companies — including Noom and Oura — will build apps to help treat diabetes and obesity. Some of the companies participating in the pledge signed on to build apps in more than one of these categories.
CMS is looking for deliverables from these 30 companies by the first quarter of next year.
The participating entities seem excited to get started on this work. B.Well CEO Kristen Valdes said that CMS’s new framework validates what the company “has believed in for over a decade,” in a statement.
“True interoperability cannot be achieved through regulatory compliance alone. It requires open standards, consumer empowerment, and a modernized architecture,” she stated.
Photo: Yuichiro Chino, Getty Images
