Trump Administration Commits to a New Patient-Centric Healthcare Ecosystem

On Wednesday, July 30, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that the White House, in collaboration with tech leaders, is committing to creating a patient-centric healthcare ecosystem. In a press release, CMS stated that during a White House “Make Health Tech Great Again” event hosted with CMS, the administration secured commitments from several healthcare and information technology firms – including Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, and OpenAI – to begin laying the foundation for a next-generation digital health ecosystem to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider burden, and drive value.

According to the news release, “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.” Additionally, “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.”

According to CMS, more than 60 companies pledged to work collaboratively to deliver results 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.’”

Additionally, CMS stated, “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. The apps will assist in the delivery of key services to beneficiaries.”

CommonWell Health Alliance is one of the organizations that signed the pledge to participate in the CMS Interoperability. “The CMS Interoperability Framework underscores the value of CommonWell’s priorities since we were founded in 2013, including capabilities that help our members to accelerate patient and provider access to complete and accurate data in a safe and flexible environment,” Paul L. Wilder, Executive Director of CommonWell Health Alliance, expressed in a statement.

Ambulatory cloud EHR, eClinicalWorks, also announced its participation. “eClinicalWorks pledges to enhance our systems, ‘Kill the Clipboard,’ to make it easy for patients to share information efficiently,” Girish Navani, CEO and cofounder of eClinicalWorks, said in a statement.

The initiative builds on the May 2025 request for information (RFI) issued jointly by CMS and the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) to solicit suggestions from stakeholders on ways to modernize the nation’s digital health ecosystem, CMS noted. “In a little over a month, the RFI generated nearly 1,400 comments from patients, caregivers, providers, payers, technology developers, and others.”

Furthermore, CMS’s news release stated that “CMS plans to add an app library to Medicare.gov to highlight trusted, personalized digital health tools focused on prevention, chronic disease management, and cost-effective care navigation.”

“For decades, bureaucrats and entrenched interests buried health data and blocked patients from taking control of their health,” Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a statement.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz contributed 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.”

“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,” OCR Director Paula M. Stannard added in a statement.

CMS posted a video on the Ecosystem initiative and published a list of companies that have currently pledged their support.