More than 60 companies join CMS’s new initiative for data interoperability and patient-facing applications
On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, together with the White House and HHS, launched a new program to create a patient-centric healthcare ecosystem.
As part of the effort, CMS has launched an interoperability framework to facilitate seamless data exchange across healthcare providers, EHR systems and technology platforms. There are already 21 healthcare data networks that have committed to meeting the framework's standards and becoming a CMS-consistent network.
These participating entities vow to enable patients and providers to access structured and unstructured health data using a secure digital identity.
“We now have the tools and information available to promote patients to improve their outcomes and healthcare experience,” CMS administrator Mehmet Oz said in a statement. “For a long time, patients in this country have been burdened with a healthcare system that has not been in sync with disruptive innovations that have changed nearly the rest of our economy. With the commitment of these entrepreneurial companies today, we are ready to shift the paradigm of the American healthcare system to promote the interests of patients and healthcare workers.”
11 health systems, including the Cleveland Clinic and Providence, also signed a White House commitment that promises to make patient health data more accessible, support secure authentication and enable third-party applications to retrieve clinical information in a standardized format.
There are also seven EHR providers dedicated to helping to promote better data exchange and better access to patient data.
Additionally, 30 companies guarantee to build consumer-facing healthcare applications.
18 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 replace paper signatures by using digital methods and eliminate the need for patients to recall and write medical history to “kill the clipboard.”
Finally, eight companies, including Noom and URA, will set up applications to help treat diabetes and obesity. Some companies involved in the commitment signed more than one of these categories.
In the first quarter of next year, CMS is looking for deliverables from these 30 companies.
The participating entities seemed happy to start the work. B. Well CEO Kristen Valdes said CMS’s new framework confirmed the company’s statement that it “has believed it for more than a decade”.
“Real interoperability cannot be achieved through regulatory compliance alone. It requires open standards, consumer empowerment and modern buildings,” she said.
Photo: Yuichiro Chino, Getty Images
