Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shakes hands with US President Donald Trump as Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz looks on at the conclusion of an event on “Making Health Technology Great Again,” in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on July 30, 2025. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
By Edward Graham,
Staff Reporter, Nextgov/FCW
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President Trump said the effort to create a more robust digital health ecosystem will give providers and patients more streamlined access to health information.
The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it secured the backing of over 60 leading healthcare and technology companies for an initiative designed to make personal medical data more accessible to U.S. consumers via digital devices.
The effort, which is largely focused on making health information interoperable and shareable across different technologies and tools, is spearheaded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In remarks delivered Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, President Donald Trump said “with today’s announcement, we take a major step to bring health care into the digital age — something that is absolutely vital.”
CMS said in a press release that the initiative is focused on two areas: promoting an interoperability framework that can “easily and seamlessly share information between patients and providers,” and expanding out a digital health technology ecosystem “so that patients have the information and resources they need to make better health decisions.”
The agency also said it is planning to add a digital app library to the Medicare.gov website “to highlight trusted, personalized digital health tools focused on prevention, chronic disease management, and cost-effective care navigation.”
Major tech firms — including Apple, Google and Amazon — signed on to the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem pledge, in addition to health providers and insurers like Humana and UnitedHealth Group.
Trump said “the key breakthrough we’ve made is getting many of the biggest names in the healthcare and technology [space] to agree to industrywide standards for electronic medical records.”
Half of the companies who signed the pledge further committed to developing new digital health tools in the coming months that will “use secure digital identity credentials to obtain medical records from CMS Aligned Networks that meet the CMS data sharing criteria.”
These apps will focus, in large part, on diabetes and obesity management, the use of conversational artificial intelligence assistants to help manage patient’s medical needs and other tools designed to promote digital-first healthcare.
“The system will be entirely opt-in, and there will be no centralized, government-run database, which everyone is always concerned about,” Trump said, adding that “instead, doctors and patients will always remain in control.”
The administration previously solicited public feedback in May on how CMS could best advance “a seamless, secure, and patient-centered digital health infrastructure.”
Oracle was one of the companies that signed on to the CMS pledge. Company executives Mike Sicilia and Seema Verma — who served as CMS administrator during Trump 1.0 — were both present at Wednesday’s White House announcement.
“We look forward to working across the healthcare ecosystem to deliver a secure, interoperable, standards-based, and AI-enabled medical records system that will foster medical breakthroughs and support better outcomes and experiences for patients and the medical professionals that care for them,” Verma, the executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said in a statement.